


roll like thunder (burn like stars)

by maebethistime



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Alternate Universe, Magical Realism, Multi, Spirits
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-13
Updated: 2015-05-25
Packaged: 2018-03-30 10:18:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 26,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3933070
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maebethistime/pseuds/maebethistime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For Soul, moving to Shibusen is the latest in a long line of desperate attempts to find somewhere of his own. After leaving home and college, he settles down to work in a pub on this strange, insular island, hoping to find inspiration for his peace of mind and his music. He hadn't counted on the water spirits though.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. your fool in a one-man show

**Author's Note:**

> sooooooo 
> 
> somehow i wrote 26k of a soma au???? this is the longest thing i've ever written for soul eater, and it's my strange child, so i hope y'all like it!
> 
> thanks go to jeb, who i bugged numerous times while i was writing this, and who put up with me screaming about word counts at her while she was just tryin to live her life. also fab and khaleesi, who kindly volunteered to beta this!! y'all are awesome
> 
> i'll be publishing this in three parts, each one longer than the last. whether you read it as it goes or all at once, enjoy!

It's after two, and the last of the twenty-somethings have lurched their way out of the pub and into the fresh night air; Soul's locked up the front and wiped down the bar, and with his coworkers ducked outside for a smoke break, he’s alone for the first time all night. There’s a strangeness to the silence of a space that's usually ringing with sound, and he stands still for a moment to listen, working his knuckles back and forth against the damp washcloth still lying on the bar. His legs ache. There's a bruise on his hip from running into the edge of a stool. The garbage needs to be taken out.

He shoves the side door open with his shoulder, arms full, and the cold outside air slaps his face like a friend trying to wake him up.

“Heard he failed out of some sort of music college and that's why he's here. Trying to get his mojo back or something.”

Soul stops moving. The garbage bag in his hands slips.

“Yeah, he had some sort of breakdown. Poor guy. I know his brother's a really awesome musician.”

The weight of the bag pushes him through the door and his foot crunches on the gravel, loud and obvious. The conversation cuts off abruptly, and Soul sets his jaw and pushes the door open fully. Patti and Liz are at the other end of the alley, faces barely visible in the coal bright glow of Patti's cigarette. Liz, from what he can see, looks embarrassed, but Patti is expressionless.

“You okay there?” she calls.

“Yeah, I got it,” Soul says, shuffling over to the dumpster. “Just, if one of you could—?”

Liz bustles over and lifts up the top of the dumpster so he can hoist the garbage in. She keeps flicking quick glances at him, rodent-like, and Soul can almost feel her apology working its way up her throat. He backs away as fast as he can, smiling.

“I'm about to head out,” he says. “I'll see you tomorrow?”

“Sure thing,” Liz says. “Yup. It'll be good. We will see you then. For sure.”

Patti thumps Liz on the arm and she cuts off. Soul waves and ducks back into the pub, closing the door behind him. He remains there in the back room, breathing in and out, just long enough for the warmth of the indoors to seep back into his bones. Then he gathers up his things, punches out on the machine by the back door, and heads off down the empty street.

It's early days in the summer, and the tourist rush he's been promised hasn't hit yet. He's glad for it; he's been here only a month and a half, but Shibusen Island is incredibly insular, and he can't imagine any more people. He'd basically picked this island off of the vague description of a classmate who said she'd been here once and that “it was musical and stormy and cool”, but even though he hadn’t really had any expectations, the island had still shattered them. The mayor's kid—who actually goes by “Kid”—came to greet him personally on his first day and show him around. He knows the names of all of the regulars at the pub already, and they all know him. Soul grew up in a house with more empty corners and silent rooms than open windows and conversation—he can't imagine what it would have been like to be a child here, where there's constant music and talking. He can't really blame everyone for wanting to know more about him—it's just how they are.

They're not so far off anyway.

Soul's cottage is down by the water, on the east side of the island, away from all of the main ports and docks for the fishing boats and ferries. It's about a seven minute walk away from the pub. He's got a short dock of his own that goes just far enough out that he can dive into the water off of it and not brain his head on the seafloor. The cottage itself—which he's technically only renting—consists of a tiny bathroom and one main room, which is sort of just a big kitchen with a bed and a dresser shoved in the corner. He rigged up some hooks to the ceiling a couple weeks ago and hung up a curtain to separate the kitchen and the “bedroom” on the off-chance that he might have some visitors someday. He hasn't yet, but Black*Star, his favourite regular and probable friend, will likely insist on coming over at some point.

The cottage is cold when he gets in, colder somehow than the air outside, as if his absence has sucked all the heat out. His guitar is propped against the wall in full view when he opens the door—he likes to put it there in the hopes that seeing it when he comes back in will make him work on something—but he's tired, and he ignores it in favour of the bed. He doesn't brush his teeth, and when he falls asleep he dreams of golden fish that look like Liz and Patti, their mouths opening and closing, the sound of Wes' violin pouring out and cutting off.

He dreams of drowning.

****

Soul feels better when he wakes up the next morning, which is strange because he hadn't really been aware of feeling particularly bad. He always ends up waking at an ungodly hour with the sunrise because the window across from his bed is on the east wall of the house, but today somehow he sleeps in later than usual, only opening his eyes when the sunlight moves off of his face and starts sliding down the floor. It's warm. There are birds singing somewhere, and if he strains he can hear the waves on the shoreline, though he's too far away from the centre of town to hear the morning songs. The island is obsessed with music of all kinds and it's piped out through speakers along the main road for the whole day; soft and bright as the sun rises; faster and louder at the peak of the day; petering out gently with nightfall. It's his favourite part of the island, and what made him sure he wanted to stay. He gets to have music all around, but also a bubble of quiet at the cottage, good for focusing.

Moving here was a good idea, he tells himself. This is good.

He gets up and makes himself breakfast, and then noodles around on the guitar for an hour or so, just getting himself used to the feel of it again. He hasn't really been playing much since he got here. He doesn't have the time to really start on anything now, but he's feeling optimistic that he could try after work. He's got a day shift at the pub today—he's usually on nights because he's good at dealing with the drunken crew, but Tsugumi's girlfriend (girlfriends? Soul isn't sure he heard right on that) is in town to visit, so she has the day off and needs someone to cover her shift. It'll be a nice change, he figures.

As he's heading up the path to the main road, there's a flash of something in the corner of his eye—movement—and he stops, glancing back at the ocean. There's nothing there, obviously, except for the glassy white spread of sunlit water, but he hesitates for a long moment, waiting, before he can make himself turn away.

****

By the end of the day, his optimism has taken a sick, strung-out twist. At 7pm, when he was supposed to get off, Liz came running in, babbling about Patti being sick, and them having no one else to cover her shift that night. And because Soul is a sucker, he somehow ends up staying till 11pm before Liz assures him that she can close up alone and kicks him out the door.

The moon is heavy and round in the sky, and it looks too bright to belong in the blackness. Soul stands on the steps outside the back door of the pub and stares up at it, wondering hazily if it will plunge down out of the sky and flatten him if he tries to walk home. It's hot out—the first wave of summer heat had started to crawl up around midday, and it still hasn't dispersed into the evening air. The atmosphere of the whole town feels like something out of a song, even with the music silent for the night, and frustration threatens to choke Soul.

When he makes it home, he doesn't even bother turning on the light; he finds his guitar in the dark because he knows where it'll be, and he stumbles back outside. Follows the pull of the moon down the steps to the sand, toeing his shoes off as he goes. Makes his way down the dock until he reaches the end.

For a crazy second, standing there, he thinks about diving off, sinking down to the bottom of the sea and making music there. His toes are sticking out over the edge; he curls them in to press against the uneven, sturdy wood, and he takes a deep breath. He holds it until his lungs feel like they're going to explode; the pressure unlocks something in his chest, and he sits down heavily on the dock, exhaling.

He settles his guitar on his lap and starts playing.

He warms up with a rendition of “Blackbird”—it gives his fingers a decent workout, and he likes how it sounds over the water. He sings along, and even though he definitely sucks, there's something about the stillness of the night that makes him sound better. Makes him brave.

Three songs in, he throws caution to the wind and starts playing his own stuff. There's no one to hear him, and he feels like there's a song in his chest that he has to get out. The moon washes everything a deathly sort of white. His bare feet are dangling in the water, feeling cool and strangely free. His fingers are buzzing, the strings burning where weeks ago it would have taken him hours to feel any pain.

He's just feeling like he's onto something, working out the final chord progression at the end of a song he's been fiddling with for ages—something his brother and teachers would call “weird”, something that's not “real music”—when his finger slips and the whole sound goes sideways.

“Fuck,” he mutters, clapping the flat of his hand to the strings to cut the noise off.

There's a splash off to his left, and then—

“Hey, don't stop! I liked that!”

Soul almost drops his guitar in the ocean.

“Holy shit,” he blurts. There's something—someone—in the water, a few metres or so away, only a shadowy head and shoulder showing above the surface. Soul yanks his feet up onto the dock, almost kneeing his guitar.

“Hey, don't be scared,” the person says, drifting closer. Their wet hair gleams, but their entire face is in darkness. Soul thinks they're a girl? “I just wanted to listen. That was good.”

“That was me,” Soul says stupidly. “And you obviously know nothing about music.” God, he thinks. When his piano teacher had first heard something he'd written, she'd told his parents that he was probably insane and needed counselling.

His visitor makes a strange, high-pitched noise—a snort?—and then disappears underwater as abruptly as a whack-a-mole retracting to avoid the hammer. There's a split second of calm, tiny ripples moving gently out from where they had been, and then something bursts out of the water a foot away from Soul. He crab walks backwards, clutching his guitar for dear life.

“Play it again!”

There are hands clinging to the edge of the dock and a chin propped on them, face tilted up into the light. Soul feels a little like he's swallowed his tongue because the person in front of him is definitely a girl, but she's...more at the same time. She has bony hands and strange, supernaturally green eyes, bright against the washed out landscape around them both. She looks like she's around his age, but it's hard to tell since she also looks kind of inhuman. Otherworldly.

“What are you?” he asks. Maybe it's rude, but he knows that “who” wouldn't be the right question.

“I'm a water spirit,” she says, looking confused. “Lived here since I was as big as a tadpole. I've never seen you around; are you new?”

“Yes,” Soul says. “Moved here a month or so back. No one told me about any water spirits!”

The girl shrugs, and Soul realizes abruptly that her slick shoulders are bare—there's no straps to show that she's wearing anything.

“We've always been here, so it's not really news. Don't show ourselves to tourists, but I liked your song so much I had to say hi. Besides, you're not a tourist, right? Said you moved here.”

“I—yeah,” Soul stammers. “I don't—god, sorry, this is weird. Are you sure you're not playing a trick on me? You don't look very much like a water spirit.”

“What are we supposed to look like then?” she asks indignantly.

“I don't know. Have...fins?”

“You're thinking of mermaids, stupid.”

“Sorry I'm not an expert on supernatural creatures!” Soul retorts.

She laughs, a weird, rattling sort of sound that should probably be scary, but instead is kind of cute.

“I'm Maka,” she says, and holds out a hand.

He stares at it for a second, and then shifts his grip on his guitar so he can shake her hand. “Soul.”

“Soul?” she says. “Seriously? You don't believe I'm a spirit, and your name is Soul?”

“I didn't choose that name,” Soul grumbles. People are always making fun of him for his stupid name. “My parents did. It's not my fault.”

“Hey, I didn't say it was a bad name,” Maka says. There are water droplets on her eyelashes, catching the light when she blinks, and it's very distracting. “Seriously, what were you playing? I haven't heard that song before.”

“Hear a lot of songs underwater?” Soul blusters, trying to stall. “Through your underwater...spirit...radio?” He cringes internally as soon as he says it—so uncool.

Maka arches an eyebrow, unimpressed. At least they're on the same wavelength.

“I can come on land whenever I want,” she says. “I've got legs. I can breathe water or air, depending on what I feel like. I get frozen yogurt at the corner store and I go to the library. When I'm dryside, I hear music. You know...through the open air...human...radio.”

She's making fun of him, and he's kind of stupidly into it, adrenaline and tiny amount of terror aside. “Really?”

“I like hearing music,” she says. “The soundwaves, they—they're soothing for water spirits, no matter what kind of music it is, though hearing it performed live is always better. I like the really rhythmic stuff usually.”

“What, like...percussion stuff?” Soul asks.

“No, more electronic,” she says. “Called trance, I think? Maybe.”

“Maybe?” Soul says. “I hope you're wrong, because that stuff's terrible.”

“Hey!” She barks out a laugh and flicks her fingers at him, drops of water speckling cool across his cheek. “I can have diverse tastes.”

“You better, because if you're comparing my stuff to that, there's no way I can take you liking it as a compliment.”

She laughs again, closing her eyes, and he can't help but laugh with her until they trickle off into silence. She looks expectant, aware he's been deflecting. Soul feels kind of sick, in an odd, out of body way. He doesn't really like talking about his music, especially unfinished stuff, and he wants desperately to impress her, caught out and confused by the strangeness of her existence.

“It's me,” he blurts. “The song, my song. Like I said before. It's a song I'm writing. It's shit, but it's me.”

She looks him over carefully.

“You don't look like shit to me.”

Soul's breath catches a little in his chest; he coughs, feeling hot under the light of her eyes.

“I meant the song,” he says.

“If it's something you've poured yourself into, it can't be shit.”

“Shut up,” he mutters. A prickle of uncomfortableness is making its way up his back.

“I mean it.”

She's there, in front of him on the edge of the dock, shining in the moonlight like some crazy, beautiful thing he's dreamed up for himself, but abruptly he feels like he's the unreal one, almost transparent next to her. She has no idea what she's talking about, no idea what makes real music, and her unfounded advice and encouragement feel like being prodded right in the sore spots of his heart.

“What would you know?” he says sharply. “You're probably just some sort of weird illusion anyways.”

It comes out harsher than he meant. She narrows her eyes, rearing back slightly from the dock, clearly stung. Soul becomes aware of a strange, distant bubbling sound, like a restless pot of water on a stove.

“I don't know much, apparently,” she mumbles. “Have fun playing sad music alone.”

“Wait,” he says, “Wait, I—”

It's flashier this time when she goes underwater—she flips backwards away from the dock, kicking up a wave of water that almost hits Soul. He recoils back from the edge, trying to protect his guitar as best he can, and when he looks back she's gone, leaving only an echoing flurry of restless, angry ripples.

“Maka?” he says softly.

There's nothing.

For a long moment he sits there, staring blankly up at the sky, trying to comprehend what just happened—trying to figure out if she was ever here or if he truly did dream her up in some messed up way to boost his own confidence. The slap of a wave against the front of the dock shakes him out of it, and he looks down to see the water churning, glass surface broken up into sharp, curling waves. He jerks to his feet and runs back down the dock to the shore, clinging tight to his guitar. Behind him, the ocean roars, chasing him all the way up the slope of the hill to his cottage.

He puts his guitar safely back inside before he remembers his shoes left on the sand.

When he goes back outside, they're gone. The beach is empty, and the water beyond is still as glass.

****

At ten years old, in the middle of the Evans' annual Christmas party, Soul realizes two important things. The first: his brother, Wes, is everything their parents want in a child. The second: Soul is not, and will never be. Soul with his family is a tomato in a bowl of apples—close in shape and colour and classification, but wrong in some undeniable way. He stands in the corner of the ballroom, wearing one of Wes' old suits, which doesn't fit him and pinches at the groin and armpits, and watches his teenage brother play the piano for their parents' guests. Wes is spectacular, classically precise, and Soul can't follow it up. He sneaks away to the bathroom, prepared to pretend to be ill if his parents come to ask him to perform. Luckily, they don't—they don't remember him for the rest of the evening, caught up in playing hosts. Soul sits on the closed toilet lid for hours, dreaming of escape, of sailing far away and never returning until he can be what they all want.

He's twenty-two now. He still dreams of escape sometimes, of water spread wide and endless, but he doesn't dream of return anymore. He lost that idea somewhere along the way.

****

The next few days, Soul avoids the dock and his guitar in equal measure. He serves food and beer at the pub and listens to the street piped music. Tourists start trickling in, clogging up the streets and inns, chattering in small, excited groups about lightning and adventure. Liz rolls her eyes. Patti kicks the men who get too fresh with her. Black*Star makes friends and enemies as fast as the population swells. The ocean is still, and Soul's mind is racing constantly, composing and imagining things faster than he can keep up with.

Maka seems to hover behind every streetlamp, just out of the corner of his eye, and he's going mad with it. Soul keeps finding himself in the yogurt shop, trance music pulsing softly in his ears, unsure as to how he got there. On Tuesday he swears he sees her through the library window, her face in a book, swaying to some unheard rhythm, but she's gone by the time he crosses the street.

“Storm soon!” says Sid when Soul stumbles back out of the library. Sid runs the funeral parlor down on the west side of the island, and right now his mouth is stretched in that wide, unnerving smile he has, a hammer hanging heavy and incongruous in his hand. “It'll be great!”

“Yes,” Soul says, because he has nothing else. He's not even sure Sid is talking to him.

Sid laughs and claps a huge hand on Soul's shoulder.

“You'll see,” he says. “I wouldn't lie to you; that's the kind of man I am!”

He backs away down the street, pointing the hammer reassuringly at Soul.

“Storm!” he says.

This island is nuts, Soul thinks. It's too hot, and Maka probably exists, and everybody is always saying strange things. Maybe he's going mad. Maybe that's what he needs to be to stay here.

For Soul, moving to Shibusen is the latest in a long line of desperate attempts to find somewhere of his own. He's always been the square peg who can't see that he doesn't fit until he's already put down roots. It hurts every time he leaves and sets up somewhere else. They say three times is lucky. They say third is the charm. He hopes they're right—he thinks if he gets attached to this island and has to leave, his roots are going to rip clean off.

There is a peal of laughter from the other side of the road, high and clear and pretty. It sounds nothing like what Soul remembers of Maka's voice, but he turns anyway, stupidly disappointed when he sees it's nothing more than a group of tourists gathering in front of the tea shop to exchange tea-related stories or something. He watches them for a moment longer, half-heartedly willing one of them to just magically become the girl he's looking for, until some teenagers come out of the library and force him to move away from the door to let them through.

He starts heading to the pub to meet Black*Star, baking under the sun. The air is thick and muggy, charged with the hint of something inevitable: the edge of a threatening storm.

****

“What do you know about water spirits?”

Black*Star drops his fistful of fries back into the basket and stares up at Soul. “What?”

Soul shifts his weight uncomfortably and glances around the pub—he feels weird about coming to his workplace on his day off, but it's Black*Star's favourite spot on the entire island, and he had said he'd wanted to “chill”. Soul's reached some sort of breaking point; he can't let a little uncomfortableness at the idea of his coworkers overhearing him stop him from getting his answers.

“Water spirits,” he repeats. “Are they...a thing?”

Black*Star squints at him, measuring him up. There's ketchup on his upper lip, smeared ridiculously like a mustache. Depending on how much Black*Star's willing to talk, Soul might tell him about it.

“Why are you asking me,” Black*Star says, “when you've already met one?”

Soul blinks. Black*Star shrugs and takes a sip of his pint.

“How do you know that?” Soul asks. “They don't like...leave a mark on you or something, do they?” He hadn't seen anything off in the mirror these past few days, and he doesn't remember her touching him directly, but clearly he can't rule anything out.

“No!” Black*Star laughs. “Don't be an idiot. Maka's my best friend—she told me a couple days back that she met some asshole with a guitar by the east side of the island. Figured it was you, and you pretty much just confirmed it.”

“What, and you just didn't tell me any of this?” Soul says, gaping. “I've been thinking I'm going crazy for days, and you knew about this?”

“She said you called her an illusion,” Black*Star says, as if that settles anything.

“Well, yeah,” Soul blusters. “She said she was a water spirit, come on, it was kind of a shock. Also, she was going on about my music and stuff—”

Black*Star snapped his fingers in Soul's face, and Soul reared back.

“See, that's your real problem, obviously!” Black*Star says. “You get real touchy about music. I asked you what kind of music you play last week and you almost bit my head off.”

Black*Star's favourite types of music are country and hardcore metal—it isn't Soul's fault that he doesn't want to share his stuff with someone who won't get it.

“Forget the music!” Soul exclaims. “Water spirits?”

“I don't know what you want here,” Black*Star says. “They exist. They live in the water around here and listen to the music and protect the island. They age just like us, so Maka's like...a year younger than me I think.”

Soul squints at him over the salt shaker. Black*Star stuffs a few more fries in his mouth.

“And you're not fucking with me?” he asks. “They for sure are a thing?”

“Jesus, if you don't believe me, go to the library: they've got a whole section on water spirits. Or, better yet, go down to the docks tonight,” Black*Star says. “Maka hangs out around there, and if you are as good at playing the guitar as she seems to think, she'll show up again, asshole or not. Then you'll see she ain't an illusion.”

“You're an asshole,” Soul says, flicking a fry at Black*Star's forehead.

“No,” says Black*Star. “I'm a god.”

“Don't throw food in my pub,” Patti yells from across the room, a stack of dirty plates in her hands. “I'll fire your ass, Soul!”

It's the thirty-second time she's threatened to fire him for no reason, so Soul isn't exactly concerned. He flips her off, and she tries to return it before Tsugumi grabs her hand, pleading something about “language” and “daytime means family-friendly establishment”.

“The only one who puts up with that 'I'm a god' stuff is Tsubaki,” Soul says, returning to Black*Star. “And that's 'cause she's your girlfriend.” Usually they're inseparable—the night Soul met Black*Star, Tsubaki was there to cart him out of the pub when he got too drunk, all apologetic smiles and bizarrely fond looks thrown in Black*Star's direction.

“It's 'cause I am a god,” Black*Star says. “In bed.”

Soul groans, and puts his face in his hands.

“Hey, if you're feeling backed-up, Maka's single, and you're not hideous. She'd consider you, as long as you stop acting like an asshole.”

“Shut up,” Soul mutters. He can still picture her bare shoulders, shining with water. Had she been naked? Were water spirits just always naked while swimming?

“And don't worry about anything not fitting—Tsubaki's half water-spirit. They have all the same stuff we do.”

“Oh my god.”

“Just don't tell Maka I told you she was free and looking, because she always goes on these 'I don't need your help getting dates, Black*Star, your hair looks stupid, Black*Star' type of rants—”

“Do you ever stop talking?” Soul says, lifting his head again.

Black*Star stares at him for a moment, and then bursts out laughing, half-chewed fries clearly visible in his open mouth.

“You sound like Kid,” he says.

Soul steals a fry while Black*Star isn't looking. He thinks about how abrupt he was to Maka, thinks about the idea of “water spirits” and how everyone around here seems to accept it as completely normal. He thinks about her saying that they don't show themselves to tourists, thinks about homes and roots.

“You have ketchup on your face,” he tells Black*Star.

“Where?”

Soul gestures vaguely, and Black*Star swipes under his nose.

“Did I get it?”

There's still half of it left.

“Yup,” says Soul.

****

The moon is just a hazy silver slice in the sky that night. In the dim light there is no divide between the beach and the ocean; it's all one dark mass, and the dock is almost lost in it, showing up just as a smear of dark blue against the water. Soul hesitates in his kitchen for a long moment, looking out at the window, before he finally picks up his guitar.

He leaves his shoes in the cottage this time.

“Maka?”

He stands a couple feet back from the edge, wary of waves if she does appear. The dock is cool against his bare feet; it's forgotten the sun-warmth of the day. Coldness creeps up his body from the wood, and he shivers hard, once, twice, 'till something settles in him.

“Maka?”

There's no sign of her anywhere, and he feels stupid for yelling out at the ocean. She may be real, but that doesn't mean she's going to show up for some crazy boy she talked to once for five minutes. She probably has better things to be doing—magical creature things.

Soul sits down on the dock, cross-legged, and sets his guitar in his lap. He flexes his fingers, one by one, working up the courage, and then starts playing his song, the one he was figuring out when Maka first showed up.

It comes easy this time—it's been boiling in his mind for days, gaining edges and flesh and magic it didn't have earlier. He told her before that the song was him, but he feels a little like she's taken over it. The music's all tied up in the shape of her head and shoulders silhouetted against the water, and he can't seem to separate it.

The song doesn't have a proper end yet, so he moves into just noodling around, testing riffs and rippling chords out as the mesh clouds shift slowly across the sky. The moon gets covered, piece by piece, and the silence around him swells until it's a physical presence, pressing in on his fingers, turning them fumbling and weak. He switches to other songs: popular music, chord exercises, melodies Wes used to play, but his drive is gone, and he fades out slowly until he's just plucking at random strings.

The quiet is peaceful when he's not trying to compete with it. He sits, guitar familiar and warm against his legs, and tries not to think.

“You stopped.”

She's there at the edge of the dock suddenly, and Soul focuses everything in him on not reacting like a startled squirrel. His heart is abruptly racing towards an early heart attack.

“Hello, again,” he says. “Took you long enough.”

“What, were you waiting?” she says, arching an eyebrow. Black*Star's words are too fresh in his mind, and he can't look away from the brightness of her wet skin. The dock hides everything below her collarbone; for a crazy second he imagines her hoisting herself onto the dock and doing the dramatic “Ariel from The Little Mermaid” pose, chest thrust out to the sky.

“No,” he says, belatedly, realizing he's been silent a weirdly long time. “I wasn't.”

“Okay,” she says, clearly not believing him. “Are you going to play anymore, or should I go?”

He's reaching out a hand in a “stop” motion before he has any idea what he's going to say.

“Don't—I—you don't need to go yet,” he stammers. “I mean, I—I'm probably done playing for the night, but we could talk...for a little. If you want.”

He sounds stupid, but she hasn't left yet, so he counts it as a win.

“Have you been here the whole time?” he asks.

She shrugs. “Last time when I said hi early on, you stopped playing. Figured if I wanted to actually hear any music, I should stay silent.”

“Do you live around this part of the island? Could you hear when I started playing?”

“Nah, I live a little farther down the coast,” she says, pointing. “Where the cliffs and caves are. But I patrol the whole island around this time, so I heard your music when I was passing by.”

“Patrol? Like...military?”

She doesn't look like military, but he knows better than to assume anything. For night shifts at the pub, Patti is the real muscle, not him.

“Kind of,” Maka says, propping her arms on the edge of the dock and resting her head on them. “Different than human military stuff for sure. But I am in charge of protection for the island.” She smiles, self-consciously pleased. “I got promoted this year when I turned twenty.”

Promoted in some sort of underwater spirit military. Soul feels like he's going to explode with the idea of it, this otherworldly existence Maka has and speaks of so casually.

“What do you protect us from?” he says. Something in his own sentence trips him up, and he realizes he said “us” without even thinking about it, placing himself firmly with the island. The thought makes him warm.

“Oh, you know,” Maka says, looking flustered for the first time since he met her. “Things. And stuff. Tidal waves, riptides, shark attacks. Water and weather related stuff. Things.”

“Sounds important,” Soul says. “What are you doing messing around talking to me?”

Maka pulls back from the dock and cocks her head, cat-like and confused.

“That's a good point,” she says. “See you later!”

And she disappears below the edge of the dock with a tiny splash.

Soul stares at the spot where she used to be, thrown off completely by the suddenness of her departure. He pulls the guitar off of his lap and sets it aside, scuttling forward to curl his fingers around the lip of dock and peer out at the water. She can't have just left like that, can she?

He barely has time to register that there's something flying towards him before his vision is gone, water slapping over his whole face and soaking him instantly. He reels backwards, swiping a hand up to get it out of his eyes. He can hear that rattling, happy laugh of hers.

“Gotcha!” she chirps. He peels his eyes open, droplets of water stretching and streaking in front of his eyes, and she's there, a foot away, hazy and beautiful. “You didn't think I'd actually leave just like that, did you?”

“Fuck off,” Soul says, grinning unwillingly. “I did not deserve that.”

“Didn't you?” Maka says. “I seem to remember you telling me last time that I didn't exist, and didn't know anything.”

Soul grimaces, slicking his wet hair off his forehead.

“Sorry about that,” he says. “I—I've been told I get weird about my music. It's probably true.”

“Probably?”

He shrugs. She's too close, all shining skin and questions. “After tons of people tell you it's shit, you get weird about it.”

“I liked it though. Told you that.”

“You—”

He stops, looking at her. She doesn't know anything about the world of music—of his famous brother and college and the walls and definitions of what “real music” are. She doesn't know anything about that, and suddenly he can see it as the freedom it is. Her eyes are glowing out through the dark, bright and waiting, and she can't point out how much of a failure he is because she has no idea what she's talking about.

“Yeah,” he says slowly. “You did say that.”

“So there's no need to get weird with me!” she exclaims triumphantly. “Play something else.”

“I said I was probably done for the night, didn't I?”

She grins, all threatening, eager teeth.

“Probably?”

“I'm going to think you only like me for my music,” Soul says, trying to flirt back. Is that what they're doing? Flirting? He wouldn't know; he's not “backed up” so much as “never fired”.

“Who says I like you at all?” Maka ducks underwater for a second, like a diver snatching a moment of breath, before she appears again, freshly wet. “I don't even know you. Play me something.”

“I—”

She's meeting his gaze head-on, curious and unafraid, only just visible through the screen of night. She right—she doesn't know him, and he doesn't know her, but music is the best bridge Soul's ever known. And he wants to know her.

He crawls back to his guitar, picks it up, and starts playing again. His fingers had only just gotten used to being away from the strings, and they burn, grounding lines of pain on his skin. The music is mindless; he focuses on her and makes it up as he goes along.

The night deepens; she watches him play and he turns her into music.

****

A month and a half ago, right before he catches the ferry to Shibusen, his brother calls him. Soul is on the walkway up onto the boat when his phone rings—he stops in the middle, suspended above the water and between his future and his past, with his phone vibrating like mad in his pocket. He plucks it out and stares at it. A bald man shuffles around him, coughing, a thick, wet sound that seems to come from deep inside his chest. Soul puts his phone back in his pocket and lets it vibrate for another minute until it stops.

Soul doesn't dislike Wes. Far from it. But he doesn't know what to say to him. Everything he might talk about always seems to already be in Wes' mouth. At the heart of it, Soul has never wanted to imitate Wes. He just wants to equal him.

On the ferry, Soul gets to talking to a woman who says she's heading to the island just to visit her family. She tells him about the junior soccer team she's coaching and her wife's garden—the perennials are doing nicely, apparently, and Soul doesn't tell her that he has no idea what that means.

“Shibusen's a lovely place,” she tells him. “Famous for its music and its storms. There's always a big storm at the start of summer and it's something to see.”

She tips her chin up, and her profile is a brief, tiny mountain range against the white sky.

“I expect it'll be as vicious as ever this year.”

She smiles soothingly, suddenly.

“But it's perfectly safe there. Never fear. You say you're going to Shibusen for the first time? What are you hoping to get out of your trip?”

Soul can see the island in the distance, small and hopeful.

“I don't know,” he says. “A job, I guess.”

The ferry's horn lets out a long, mournful sound, announcing their approach.

“Well,” the lady says. “You'll find more than that if you stay a little longer, I'm sure.”


	2. you set my sails when the tide was low

In the coming week, the tourists descend upon the town like a swarm of locusts. They're everywhere, arguing over prices in the stores and flocking to the main beach in droves. Patti takes more smoke breaks. Black*Star loses his favourite table at the pub and almost throws a fit before Tsubaki manages to calm him down. Soul spends his days swimming upstream on the sidewalks and in the shops, navigating around groups of people clumped together like schools of chattering fish. He spends his nights on the end of the dock, talking to Maka and playing music. 

At first it's mostly him playing guitar and her offering the occasional suggestion or comment, but as the week goes on they both start talking more, telling each other about their respective days. He tells her about stupid things he messed up at work and the weird people they get in at the pub now, like the man who wanted a whole pineapple on the side, and the triplets who spoke in unison and all ordered a scotch on the rocks, and the woman who demanded they pay for her ferry ticket off the island once she discovered that they did not serve the rare type of unpronounceable alcohol she wanted. In turn, Maka tells him about how annoying it is to hide when the tourists are around, and how much garbage they throw in the water that has to be cleaned up by the spirits. She talks about taking care of the tourists if they get too near a developing riptide while swimming, and the damage control they have to do if one of them is spotted. To him, her stories are all very intense and magical, and it feels like food to Soul's fingers.

They talk and talk, and she swims around in the moonlight and bugs him about playing more. He does what he's told.

“Someone's looking chipper!” Liz teases him at work. “Ya got a girlfriend? A boyfriend? A significant other of some type?”

“No,” Soul always says, because he doesn't. And he may be attracted to Maka for sure, but he has no idea where her head is about that kind of thing, or whether she would even entertain the possibility of dating him, Black*Star's pushing aside.

“Well, you clearly liiiike someone,” Liz simpers.

Soul shrugs and she bursts into cackling laughter.

“I'll stop bugging you for now,” she says. “But you will tell me eventually.”

Days scream past. It gets warmer and warmer. On a Friday night Soul's shift ends early and Black*Star and Tsubaki invite him to join their booth in the pub and get truly wasted. That's not his scene usually—he doesn't feel comfortable with party type atmospheres—but he gives it a go because he's had a long day and the crowd isn't too big anymore. After about two drinks Black*Star asks him if he ever met up with Maka again, and Soul avoids the question as smoothly as he can while feeling tipsy—he sort of wants to keep those meetings with Maka to himself until he's figured out whether they mean more than inspiration for him and a mini concert for her. Tsubaki manages to distract Black*Star before he can pursue the topic, and Soul pounds back another one of the embarrassingly pink drinks Black*Star had ordered for him (the joke is on Black*Star though: Soul loves the sugary ones best).

By the time they separate for the night and Soul makes it down to the dock, he's staggering a bit and Maka is already there, swimming figure eights and throwing a fish up into the air.

“Oh my god,” Soul says as he plops down at the end of the dock. “Are you going to eat that?”

Maka drops the fish and turns to stare at him.

“No,” she says slowly. “I hate raw fish. And spirits don't really need to eat, we just like to. Are you drunk?”

“Yes,” Soul says seriously. It's important she knows, probably. “If I fall off the dock, you might have to rescue me from drowning.”

“The water wouldn't even be over your head here,” Maka says. She has her judgey face on, but she's laughing a little, so Soul is taking it as a win.

“Yes,” Soul says. “Can I have some of the fish?”

“No, god!” Maka says, splashing water at him. It feels good on his face. “Leave my fish friends alone, you bloody cave man. Besides, she's gone now.”

“I don't think I can play you anything right now,” Soul says. “I don't wanna...don't...wanna hurt my guitar.” He keeps getting distracted mid-sentence, but he remembers the last time he got drunk and tried to play an instrument he accidentally left scratches from the guitar pic all down the side of it. He's not doing that again.

“That's okay,” she says.

“Are you gonna leave?” he asks.

“Not just yet.”

“Good.”

He flops on his back and stares up at the stars. He fails to find the Big Dipper and she laughs at him for about five minutes before she takes his hand and points to it. He tells her he knows nothing about any other star formations, and she starts pointing out the constellations she learned as a kid.

“They're different than the ones you guys learn,” she says. “See, there's the whale, Kishin, there. And the demon sword, Ragnarok.”

“Demon sword?” Soul says. “I think we have a whale, but we don’t have anything as cool as that. Just bears, and shit.”

“Well, that's 'cause humans are boring,” Maka says. “I like our whale though, because it's easy to find. The story of that one is that it tried to swallow the whole earth at the beginning of time because it was afraid of it.”

“Did it choke on it?” Soul asks. He can't imagine swallowing the whole earth. Maybe like, a grape.

“Well, it sort of imploded,” she explains. “It realized there was a whole universe around it and that it could never swallow it all, and the fear made it explode and all the little parts of it became the stars for the constellation.”

“So...we're looking at whale guts?”

“It's a story, dumbass!”

“Right, right.”

“The point of the story is to teach us about bravery,” she says. “And that acting on fear is a stupid idea.”

“And will do nothing but get you exploded,” Soul finishes. He's a smart guy—he gets morals.

“Exactly.”

“I get afraid of lots of things,” Soul says. “Sometimes so much I feel like I could explode.”

“What kind of things?”

He turns his head sideways and she's right there, chin propped on her arms on the edge of the dock, gazing up at the stars. I'm afraid to tell you how much I like spending time with you, he thinks. Luckily, he's not drunk enough to say it.

“I get scared of stuff about me sometimes,” he says. The stars have stopped swirling so much above him and there's a peculiar sort of peace in his chest. “Get scared that I'll push people away, or that I'll never live up to...what I'm...supposed to live up to. I'll let myself down.”

She shifts her gaze from the sky to him.

“I know what you mean,” she says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. There are things I hold onto that I worry will keep me from truly...connecting to people. And I definitely know what you mean about trying to live up to expectations. Even just your own expectations.”

“Those ones are the worst.”

“Yeah.”

Soul looks back up at the stars and realizes he's already lost track of where the constellations she showed him are.

“I'll play you something new tomorrow for sure,” he says.

“I'm holding you to that. No claiming you don't remember.”

“I'm not that drunk.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm not!”

He wakes up the next day with a splitting headache, but with full memory of the night before. For a solid two hours he doesn't move from bed, half-heartedly wishing he would just die and become one with the comforter. He'd been stupid in front of Maka and his head hurts now. Life, he thinks, is clearly pointless.

He gets up a little after noon and forces himself to eat some food. He's got the day off, which is nice, and he'd planned to do a little solo exploring of some of the big forest on the north side of the island. As soon as his head is no longer killing him and he can open his eyes more than a slit, he packs himself some food and water and heads out. 

He comes back in the afternoon thrumming with excitement. The woods had been dark and deep and the music from the town was barely audible, made creepy and thin by the distance. He'd stood on a rock in a pool of lone sunshine streaming down through the trees and thought about the massive, impossible idea of a whale swallowing the earth. When he closed his eyes he could almost feel it, the darkness closing around him, the heat and the ultimate fear of it all, and he'd pulled out his pocket recorder and turned it on, let it record the sounds of the forest so he could remember this feeling. Back in the cottage he grabs his guitar and sits down, letting the recorder play back on a loop, and he writes and writes.

He plays what he has back to Maka that night and she closes her eyes when she listens, bobbing slightly up and down in the water.

“Told you I'd have something new,” he says, nervous and excited by the look on her face. “I mean, it's not done—it would sound better with some piano and more patches of sound from the island, but it's something.”

“It is,” she says. She looks like she's glowing. “I like it.”

I like you, he thinks suddenly. He doesn't say it, of course. He's not that much of an idiot.

****

“Do you guys ever get time off?” he asks one night, when they've known each other about two and a half weeks. It feels like longer to him. 

“Well, yeah,” she says. “Less for me, because I've got more things to oversee, and this time of year is busy. Preparations and shit. But yeah, that's usually when I come up into town. My free time.”

Apparently there are some caves at the bottom of the cliff that are hidden, accessible mostly only by the water, and that's where the spirits keep their clothes and things to go up into the town. In the caves they have lockers and rooms and computers and a system to figure out how much of an allowance they get if they want to go into town. All of the coins that get scraped out of the bottom of the fountain in the centre of town go to the spirits. They don't use money usually, but they use it during the tourist season when they're dryside so that the tourists don't get confused that some people get everything for free. It's a complicated system, but Maka says she's got good people running it.

“Preparations?”

She shrugs. She's been twitchier lately—it's been grey and gloomy more often, and the worse the weather gets, the more nervous she gets. Soul puts it down to some sort of water spirit thing.

“For things,” she says. “Anyway, why do you care about my free time?”

“How did you get this job?” Soul asks. If she gets to dodge questions, so does he. He's not about to explain that he maybe wants to ask her on a date, because that would be lame. “Like, you're really important in the ranks or whatever of the spirits, how did that happen?”

“Combination of work and...sort of being born into it,” she says, looking uncomfortable. “I mean, it's all down to myself that I've gotten where I am, but my dad's kind of important. It's not that I was given things because of him, because I didn't, but...I probably got some talent from him or something.”

“Is that part of the 'living up to expectations' thing we talked about last week?” Soul asks.

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Don't like to talk about it?” Soul recognizes the hunted look on her face.

She shakes her head. “Not really.”

Soul nods. Strums a few mournful chords. “I get that.”

“Are you weird about family too?”

“Yeah.”

“Yeah.”

Soul's taken to bringing his little recording device out to the end of the dock when he goes to meet Maka, recording any new things he comes up with out of just being around her. Ever since he went out to the forest he's had this hazy idea of putting together an album—or at least a collection of songs—based around her, around spirits, around this whole island. He's only got snippets, but he recreates them in the quiet of his cottage for better recording equipment and puts them on his computer in unnamed tracks. The most exciting part about it to him is that it's just something he wants to do, not something he wants to throw in his family's face, or make for school. It's for him. For the sake of music itself, even if it's only his idea of it.

“Can I record you swimming around?” he asks. “Just—water sounds would be cool to put in something, I think.”

“Sure,” she says. “What do you need? Splashes? Waves, ripples, loud, soft?”

“Do whatever,” he says, pressing the button on the recorder. “I'll pull pieces from it later.”

She grins at him and backflips into the water, too fast for him to see anything other than a blur of pale, wet skin. He slams his eyes shut anyways, a shaky giddiness surging up through his stomach. He can hear frantic, sloppy splashing, like a little kid kicking their feet, and he has to bite back a laugh so he doesn't mess up the recording. The splashing stops abruptly—Maka probably slipping all the way underwater—and for a long moment there's nothing but the sound of ripples folding softly over each other. Then, tiny at first, comes a vague bubbling, growing louder and crisper with every second, swelling until it's deafening. The air around him feels like it's moving, like it is the sound itself, and he can feel the spray of water on his knees and his face and his hands where he's clutching the recorder to his chest.

He opens his eyes, and the water all around the dock is alive, roiling and spitting and climbing up into white, frothing foam, hugely improbable bubbles inflating and bursting into shimmering drops of water. Maka is in the centre of it, her arms spread out to the sky, grinning like mad, and Soul doesn't know when he started smiling, but he's staring around, staring at her, and his face hurts with it.

Maka sweeps her arms down sharply and the water drops, going from boiling to mirror glass smooth in the space of a second, and suddenly without the huge bubbles in the way Soul can see that Maka's farther out of the water than he's ever seen her, shoulders to waist out in the open air. They realize it at the same time—Soul almost drops his recorder, and Maka lets out a tiny, high-pitched noise and sinks down into the water until only the top of her head is showing, hair spread out on the surface.

The wood is damp from her display, and the recorder is still going. Soul fumbles for the “stop” button. He stares at the way Maka's hair fans out against the water, like a strange abstract pattern in a painting. He'd been right, he thinks shakily. The spirits _are_ naked in the water.

“I couldn't see—” he starts.

Maka's head pops out of the water.

“I didn't mean to—” she says.

“—it's too dark, I didn't see any—”

“—like I didn't do that on purpose, I just—”

They both stop talking, blinking warily at each other. Soul can't tell if she's blushing, but he knows he is.

“I'm just going to go now,” Maka says. “I've had enough music for one night, I think.”

“Oh,” says Soul. “Okay, yeah, sure. That's cool. That's—will I see you tomorrow?”

She's silent for long enough that Soul thinks he's done it, he's gone and ruined everything without even really having done anything himself, but then she lets out a slow, raspy sigh. She nudges a gentle wave his way, says, “yeah,” and disappears into the water.

Soul sits there on the dock for a long time after she's gone, playing the sound of her water antics out loud and trying to convince himself he actually hadn't seen anything.

****

Soul's on the steps outside his house the next morning, recording the sound of birdsong against the waves on the beach, when Black*Star comes running up.

“Soul!” he yells, arms windmilling. “Soul, buddy, friend, pal, bro!” He skids to a stop just in front of the bottom step, sand spraying up over Soul's feet.

Soul flicks off his recorder. “What?”

“Don't 'what' me,” Black*Star says indignantly. “You've got a day off, so we're going to hang out properly. We're supposed to be friends, and I don't think I've even seen the inside of your house before.”

“It's pretty messy right now,” Soul says. It's true—he's got instruments and cords and junk strewn all over his table and bed, a frustrated splash of tools. He woke up feeling unsettled this morning, like his skin didn't fit properly and he needed to do something to swell himself up. Nothing worked though, and the mess chased him outside.

“Well, nevermind your house,” Black*Star says. “Because me and 'Baki are meeting Kilik and some peeps to play basketball and eat food and stuff, and you're coming.”

“Am I?” Soul says, pleased beyond words to be included and not wanting it to show.

“You definitely are,” Black*Star says firmly, dragging him to his feet. Soul shoves his recorder into his pocket and allows himself to be pulled up the hill to the road. “You do know Kilik, right? He's come with me to the pub before, you've definitely met him, he's cool, though he always orders that gross blue cheese burger you guys have...”

Black*Star talks non-stop as they make their way into town, pausing occasionally in his detailed recounting of Kilik's finer points to yell greetings to people on the other side of the street. They turn off the main road pretty soon into the suburbs and spend a solid five minutes climbing over hedges and fences to walk through people's backyards, Black*Star insisting that “it's fine, I do this all the time”.

“We're going to my place,” he says. “Kilik and Tsubaki and some other people are already there—I wanted to get you myself so those two could spend a little time together without me around.”

“Kilik...and Tsubaki spending time together?” Soul clarifies, stumbling after Black*Star. Most things Black*Star says need to be repeated before they make any sense.

“Yeah,” Black*Star says. “Me and Tsubaki are thinking of maybe opening things up, getting a third, and we both really like Kilik, but we wanna see how he gels with each of us individually and as a unit before we surprise the guy with any proposals.”

It takes Soul a second to process that.

“Wait—you both...wanna date Kilik?”

“It's called polyamory, bro!” Black*Star says cheerfully. “Tsubaki's insatiable and I got a lot of love to give. And Kilik is hot. Like mega hot. You'll see. It's just up here.”

He jogs across the street to a small house that looks just like all the other ones on the street except for a bright red front door. There's a gate to the backyard branching off from the side of the house and Soul can hear the sound of laughter and the rhythm of a basketball drumming against pavement.

Black*Star vaults over the gate and cups his hands around his mouth.

“Oi!” he yells. “All bow down! The great Black*Star has returned!”

He glances back at Soul, who is still dawdling in the middle of the empty street, and waves for Soul to follow before disappearing around the back of the house. Soul takes a second to get his bearings—Black*Star's an overwhelming person, and Soul needs a moment of quiet to steel himself for continued social interaction—and then goes after him. He clambers over the fence and walks down the small strip of grass, the voices getting louder and louder. Under Black*Star's cackle he can make out what he thinks is Tsubaki, and then another male voice, and then—

Then he rounds the corner into the backyard and stops still.

There's a short stretch of grass and then a wide rectangle of pavement for a basketball court, one basket set up normally on a post and the other hanging precariously from a tree, clearly homemade. There's four people on the court: Black*Star is nuzzling up to a black guy with glasses whom Soul assumes must be Kilik, and Tsubaki is standing a few metres away, whispering excitedly to another girl. The girl's back is to Soul, but it doesn't matter—he knows the nape of that neck and he knows those shoulders, even with clothes covering her skin. The recognition is like an electric charge through his body—his day and night are colliding, and his stomach is doing somersaults.

“Soul!” Black*Star says excitedly, wheeling around to face Soul and drawing everyone else's gaze with him. Maka's eyes meet Soul's and she freezes as well. He can't help but notice, dizzily, that the sunlight looks good on her face, her hair, her everything.

“Soul, this is my man Kilik,” Black*Star says, squeezing his arm around the black guy's side. Kilik peels his eyes away from Black*Star to smile and nod at Soul. He is, in fact, mega hot. “Kilik, Soul. And of course, you've met Maka, right?”

_You little dick,_ Soul wants to say. Black*Star clearly sees it on his face, his sharp, shit-eating grin widening in satisfaction.

“Uh, yeah,” Soul says. Maka's no longer looking at him—she's turned back to Tsubaki, as if she isn't even weirded out to see him dryside after two weeks of meeting at night on his dock. As if she isn't even weirded out by what happened last night.

“Right, well, we've got uneven teams, so I'm proposing me and Kilik take the three of you on,” Black*Star says. “Anybody opposed?”

“Wait,” Maka says, putting her hand up. She sounds different out of the water, more human somehow, and god, Soul needs to stop staring at her. “First off, you should've invited Kid, then we'd have equal teams.”

“He was busy,” Tsubaki says. Soul almost believes it coming from her, but Black*Star's exaggerated nodding behind her erases that possibility.

“Second thing,” Maka continues, narrowing her eyes suspiciously. “I've never actually played a proper game of basketball. I don't know anything about the positions.”

“Wow,” Black*Star says loudly. “This sounds like a great opportunity for you two”—he slings his other arm around Tsubaki's waist and yanks both her and Kilik together—“to give Maka a little rundown. I know you guys'll make a good team.”

Tsubaki is blushing, and Kilik is looking at her the same way he was just looking at Black*Star—a little dazed, a lot interested. Soul is pretty sure that Black*Star's proposal—whatever and whenever it's gonna be—is not going to be turned down.

Soul waits until Kilik and Tsubaki are haltingly explaining things to a very put-upon looking Maka before he drags Black*Star away from the court.

“Why didn't you tell me Maka was going to be here?” he hisses.

“First off,” Black*Star says magnanimously. “You should be thanking me. You may not talk to me ever about things, but Maka does, so I know you've seen each other for little late night chats for a while now. Nothing like hanging out in the day to grease the wheels a bit. And second, not everything is about you. Maka volunteered to help me and Tsubaki woo Kilik, because she's awesome, and she loves me.”

Maka shoots them a glance over her shoulder, clearly having noticed that they've pulled away from the group. She looks away quickly when she sees Soul looking in her direction.

“Did she know I would be here?” Soul asks.

“Ahhhh, well,” Black*Star drawls, waggling a hand in a so-so sort of gesture, “not really. But you guys move too slow for my tastes, and time is a wasting. Come on!”

Without waiting for Soul to reply, he bounds off back to the court and steals the basketball right out of Maka's hands.

“That's enough teaching for now,” he yells. “I'm sure she gets it. Let's play!”

Black*Star and Kilik retreat to their side of the court for a whispered conversation and Soul awkwardly  sidles onto the pavement. Tsubaki gives him a little wave and then conspicuously moves away towards the centre of the court, leaving Soul and Maka standing next to each other.

“Hey,” Soul says.

“Hey,” she parrots back, smiling ruefully.

“From what you've told me, I thought the only thing you ever did for fun was read books and listen to music,” Soul says. “Maybe if you're up for doing other things you won't end up growing mushrooms on your head.”

Maka gapes at him and he tries very hard to look like he's cool and chill and unbothered by her presence or memories from last night. It's not like she can sense that he's never seen anyone other than himself naked in real life. Virginity is a social construct, he thinks inanely.

She snaps out of her shock and punches him in the arm; it's surprisingly painful.

“Shut up,” she mutters. “If we weren't on the same team, I would kick your ass. Mushrooms on my head? Reading is fun!”

“Whatever,” says Soul. He nudges her side with his elbow, trying not to think about how this is the first time he's actually touched her. The dock and the water separated them before, but here they're on the same playing ground, more similar than they are different. “Let's just beat Black*Star.”

“Obviously,” she snipes back.

Tsubaki and Kilik face off against each other to jump for the ball. Maka is given the task of throwing it up because she's deemed by Black*Star as the least likely to cheat. Tsubaki wins the jump, hitting it back to Soul, and then they're off.

Maka was not kidding—she clearly has no idea what she's doing. At first she just waves her arms a lot and tackles Black*Star to distract him while Soul or Tsubaki go for a shot, but after a while she starts trying to play properly, asking for the ball and making shots or passing when she gets it. It's a work in progress; she hits Kilik in the face at one point (which does give Tsubaki a chance to stand unnecessarily close to him while fussing about first aid) and gets the ball stolen from her more times than Soul can count. But somewhere along the way something between them starts to sync up.

Tsubaki is distracted by her two beaus more often than not, and the bulk of work for their team lands on Soul and Maka's shoulders. As the morning goes on, a physical understanding grows in the steps that separate Soul from Maka—he starts to know where she will be in a second's time in order to catch his pass, to know where he needs to be for her. They meet eyes over Black*Star's shoulder and Soul can read the plan as plainly as if she had said it out loud. There's an energy flowing between them, a feedback loop that makes him feel like he's been plugged directly into a wall socket, like he's charged full and could run and run and run for hours on the power of her with him.

They lose, because Black*Star and Kilik are clearly people who play basketball a lot, but it's closer than it should have been, and when they collapse on the grass for a break, Black*Star looks vaguely impressed.

“Okay, next time, you two aren't on the same team,” he moans.

Soul pushes himself up off the ground to high five Maka before flopping down on his back again.

“You still won,” Maka says to Black*Star. Her eyes are closed, face tilted up into the sun, and Soul looks away before she can catch him.

“I think that was all down to Kilik,” Tsubaki says.

“Yeah!” Black*Star says. “I mean, okay, no, most of it was me, but also, look at the muscles on this guy, huh?”

Kilik bursts into laughter and Soul closes his own eyes; he doesn't need to see Black*Star's clumsy flirtations. The sun is warm on his skin and he drifts for a long moment, the voices around him fading into static background like a radio kept on for too long.

He's broken out of it only when something brushes against his side; he opens his eyes to see that Maka has sat up abruptly, collecting her knees up close to her chin as she leans forward. There are geometric imprints of grass cross-hatched into the pale skin of her calves—Soul stares, unsettled for some unknown reason deep in his chest. She's too human out here in the air.

“How did you guys meet?” he asks suddenly, looking away from Maka to aim the question at Black*Star. “Like, all of you.”

“Well, me and Maka have known each other since she was a bunch of bubbles in a toilet,”—a shadow passes over Soul's face; Maka's arm flashing out to punch Black*Star in the arm—“'cause I was an orphan who spent all his time by the beach—”

“—and I hated my life enough to willingly spend time with you,” Maka interjects.

“Whatever, my presence is a gift,” Black*Star says. “Anyway, I met the star of my life, Tsubaki,”—he swings an arm around Tsubaki's shoulders and Soul notices Kilik looking away, his smile dimming—“in high school and we were friends for ages before she decided that looking after me was a romantic thing, because, obviously, who could pass this up?”

He gestures to himself, grinning broadly around like he's waiting for applause.

“Many people,” Maka deadpans. “Thousands of people. People like that boy you had a crush on in fifth grade.”

“Okay, Justin was a dick,” Black*Star says. “He wouldn't even take his headphones out to hear me talk, so he clearly didn't deserve me.”

“You—” Kilik says slowly. “You liked a guy?"

“Oh, yeah,” Maka says casually. “You didn't know? Black*Star's pan and poly.” Black*Star shoots Maka an incredibly obvious thumbs up and Tsubaki frantically claps her hand over his to cover it up.

“And—and so am I,” Tsubaki puts in, with infinitely less casualness. “Poly, that is. Yup. What about, um, what about you?”

Kilik opens and closes his mouth, staring at Black*Star and Tsubaki, who have somehow tangled themselves around each other during the conversation so that they resemble a two-headed snake more than separate people.

“Yeah, how did you meet Black*Star?” Soul says. Kilik seems like a confident guy in general, but someone should still help him out in the face of Black*Star and Tsubaki's overwhelming attention.

“Oh, right,” Kilik says, seizing upon the question with relief. “Uh, well, I moved here about two years back now, with my kids, and I work down at the docks with Black*Star, working on the boats and stuff. So we met there.”

“You have kids?” Soul says. Kilik can't be much younger than Soul, and certainly isn't older, and while it's not unheard of for someone over 20 to have kids, it's still a weird shock to Soul if he meets a parent his age. Especially if two of his friends want to invite said parent into a polyamorous relationship.

Kilik steels his jaw, a defensive mask coming over his face.

“Yeah,” he says. “Twins. Girl and a boy. Their mum's out of the picture, has been since they were born, so it's just me and them. They're three, and they're great.”

He wraps his hand around a hunk of grass and rips it out of the ground to punctuate his statement. It's almost like he's waiting for someone to disagree with him.

“What are their names?” Soul asks.

Kilik still looks vaguely suspicious, but he softens a little at that, fists relaxing.

“Fire and Thunder,” he says.

“They're lovely,” Tsubaki says. “Star and I have met them and they're—they're adorable, really.”

“Yeah, but you haven't seen them at bedtime,” Kilik laughs. He opens his hand and lets the blades of grass fall gently to the earth before looking up at Tsubaki again. “They like you. You're really good with them.”

“What about me?” Black*Star whines, because it's a well-documented fact that he can't go five seconds in a conversation without all the attention on him. “If they like Tsubaki, they gotta love me, right?”

“I bet they hate you,” Maka says, her smile half-hidden behind her knees.

Black*Star starts untangling himself from Tsubaki, looking ready to throw down, and Kilik quickly gets his hands up between them.

“They think you're awesome, Black*Star,” he says.

“But if they got over their fear of water, they would think I was way awesomer,” Maka grumbles.

Soul can't help laughing at that. “They're afraid of you?”

“They’re afraid of water spirits in general,”Maka corrects. “They were perfectly fine with me until I tried to show them some tricks I can do, which terrified them, and they have refused to see me since. That was like, a year ago too.”

“What did you do?” Soul asks. “Conjure up a tidal wave?”

“Oh, yeah, 'cause I'm stupid enough to make a tsunami for the amusement of babies,” Maka mutters, shoving lightly at Soul's shoulder. “No, it was just little stuff.”

“Show him, show him!” Tsubaki exclaims.

“I am starting to feel thirsty,” Black*Star comments, faux-thoughtfully.

Maka rolls her eyes, but everyone's watching her now, and she cracks a small, pleased smile.

“Okay,” she says, and they all whoop and cheer and clap her on until she waves her arms and shouts for quiet.

She closes her eyes and for a moment she's completely still, like she's trying to hear something far off in the distance. Then she opens her hand and a trail of white steam spins up from her palm before forming into a tiny globe of floating water, clear and shimmering in the sun.

“Sick,” Kilik says, clearly impressed.

“I wish I could do that,” Tsubaki says wistfully. “Half-water-spirit just means I can dry off really quickly after swimming, apparently.”

Soul says nothing, because he's a little afraid he'll end up breathing something stupid about magic and beauty and how amazing Maka is.

“There's a tap dripping upstairs in Star's bathroom,” Maka says, sounding distant. “I'm just stealing a little of the water from there.”

“Hey,” Black*Star says indignantly. “That's mine!”

“Ours,” Tsubaki corrects.

“I don't know,” Maka says cheekily, opening her eyes again to smirk at Black*Star. “It looks like it's mine right now. If you want it back though...I guess I could...”

She flicks her wrist suddenly, lobbing the ball of water right into Black*Star's face. Black*Star roars in fury, Tsubaki squeals, and Soul and Kilik burst into simultaneous laughter. Maka grins, sharp and familiar, giggles bursting like trapped bubbles in her throat.

“You did say you were thirsty,” she says.

Black*Star shakes his head like a dog, sending water droplets spattering over them all.

“Oh, fuck you Albarn,” he says, and lunges.

The two of them go rolling down the grass, wrestling like cats, and the rest of them start chanting support for Maka. Black*Star pauses in fighting first to take offence that Kilik isn't cheering for him and then to yell, “Tsubaki, at least you should be on my side”, and it's enough of a distraction that Maka is the clear winner, knocking him on his back and dancing up and away with her arms held over her head.

“I am the champion, my friends,” she sings, raspy spirit voice distorting the tune until it sounds like something completely different, something not of this world. Soul's laughter dies in his throat. He's very aware of the recorder still in his pocket, waiting for more sound bites for songs.

“That's not how the song even goes,” Black*Star grumbles, laid flat on his back.

“Soul,” Maka says, spinning to face him abruptly, still grinning. “You know music. Tell this loser that that's how the song goes.”

“I figure the song is whatever the winner says it is,” Soul says. “Sorry, Black*Star.”

Black*Star whines about conspiracy and unfairness until Tsubaki and Kilik come over to help him up and pay attention to him. Soul stays where he is, watching Maka laugh at the other three, and thinks to himself that this is one of the best days he's had in months.

****

They retreat inside to get some lunch and squabble over sandwich making materials in Black*Star and Tsubaki's kitchen; both Kilik and Maka want the last bit of peanut butter and start having some sort of complicated competition to win it, judged by Black*Star. When utensils start flying, Tsubaki retreats to the basement under the pretense of getting pop. After a moment longer, Soul decides she's got the right idea, and follows her.

It's cool and quiet in the basement, surprisingly so; the second he closes the door behind him he can barely hear the other three yelling in the kitchen. He pauses halfway down the stairs for a moment, listening to their muffled, disembodied voices, and then climbs the rest of the way down until he sees Tsubaki in a dim corner, leaning over into a giant freezer.

“Hey,” he says. “I can give you a hand, if you want.”

“Oh, thanks!” Tsubaki says, glancing over her shoulder at him. She straightens up, five cans of root beer cradled in her arms, and awkwardly sets them down on a cardboard box full of tomato cans before handing Soul one can. “I figure they won't notice if we stay down here for just a minute though. Kilik and Maka are pretty competitive people, so all the fuss could last a while.”

Soul accepts the pop and cracks it open for a sip.

“How long have you and Black*Star,” he starts, trailing off a little in uncertainty, “uh, been looking for a third?”

“We haven't been,” Tsubaki says, opening up a pop for herself. “I mean, we both knew we were poly when we got together, but we agreed that if we added anyone to our relationship, it would be someone we both wanted romantically, and who wanted both of us. We wanted to be a unit no matter what. So we were fine with monogamy since there wasn't anyone around that fit into that idea.”

“And then you guys met Kilik?”

She shrugs, a small smile coming over her face. “It wasn't that fast. We met him and he was great and we became friends and...I guess the more we spent time with him, the more we both started to think about it, but we only really had that conversation together about feelings about a month ago.”

“What about his kids?” Soul asks.

“That's why it's taken us this long to act on it,” Tsubaki admits. “They're really little and we don't want to possibly mess them up by having them get used to having us around a lot and then...what if Kilik and us broke up and the kids were confused about why we weren't always there anymore...”

“There's a lot of factors, yeah,” Soul says. A strange sort of relief spreads through him; it's not that he thought Tsubaki wouldn't have thought about the kids, because Tsubaki's awesome, but he knows how much family can fuck a kid up.

“And the twins are Kilik's priority for sure.” Tsubaki takes a long pull of root beer and exhales slowly. “We know it's complicated, but we're on board to try. What about you?”

Her question follows so quickly on the heels of their other discussion that it catches him completely off guard. “What?”

“With Maka,” Tsubaki says calmly. “You like her, right?

Soul changes his mind. Tsubaki is horrible.

“I—”

He looks down at the ground, avoiding her eyes. The floor is dirty cement, a strange, dark stain peeking out from under his socked feet, and he shuffles until he can cover it up completely. He's lost for words. There's really one answer for him, but he doesn't know if their meetings at the end of the dock have meant the same thing to her that they have to him. He can't tell if she's been flirting back, but either way he's not even sure if it would matter; she is music and magic and he is nothing more than a stupid kid who couldn't even get a music degree.

“Well,” Tsubaki says at length. “Regardless, I'm glad you came today. Whether Black*Star's little 'double date' plan is how things are between you and Maka or not, I know she had fun this morning, and god knows she needs all the relaxation and happiness she can get right now.”

Something about the way she says that sticks into Soul. It sounds like more than just a commentary on Maka being too serious or uptight—which hasn't been the truth as he's seen it anyway—and he asks, “What do you mean?”

“Well, it's almost time, isn't it?” Tsubaki says. “For the storm.”

The basement door slams open like a clap of thunder directly above, and Soul splashes root beer all over his hand.

“Tsubaki!” Black*Star yells. “What are you guys doing down there? Are you two fucking or something?”

Tsubaki bursts into laughter and Black*Star dramatically howls, “You are, aren't you? Oh my god, guys, Tsubaki is leaving me for Soul!”

Tsubaki picks up two more of the root beer cans lying on the cardboard box and slips past Soul to head up the stairs, still giggling. The door is left open, and Soul can hear them all talking, joking a floor above him.

“I'll just have to date Kilik, clearly,” Black*Star says.

“How do you know I'm not going to prove myself better than Soul and steal Tsubaki away?” Kilik counters.

“Poor Black*Star's left all alone,” Maka says.

Soul blinks and shudders slowly, trying to shake off the strange feeling in him. He grabs the last root beer and heads up the steps as fast as he can, needing to feel warmth again.

“That would never happen,” Black*Star's saying when Soul makes it back into the kitchen. “I'm too great to be single. Clearly they both will have to date me.”

“Looks like I'm the one left in the lurch then,” Soul says. There are half-eaten sandwiches lying all over the counter, and the only one without a pop is Maka. Soul hands the remaining one over to her, his own held safe in his other hand.

“Not necessarily,” Kilik says, flushed either from his battle with Maka or from Black*Star's arm around his shoulder. “I mean, Maka's here.”

Maka glances up at Soul in the middle of taking the root beer from him, one of her fingers laying softly over his. Their eyes meet, and Soul is hit with a flash of last night, of Maka with water around her waist and moonlight in her hair. Maka takes the pop from him and he pulls his hand back as fast as he can.

“So, uh, what's with the storm?” he blurts out.

Something goes strange in the air all at once, everything darkening as if the sun had abruptly dropped out of the sky. The can in his hand is cutting into him with coldness and Tsubaki's face says that he shouldn't have said what he just did.

“What?” Kilik says. He looks the most comfortable out of all of them. “You don't know what a storm is?”

“I just—”

Maka isn't looking at Soul, but he's looking at her.

“I've just heard a lot of vague stuff from people about this island and storms,” Soul says. “It just seems like—I dunno, like more than how people anywhere else I've been talk about them. It seems like something important.”

Black*Star steps away from Tsubaki and Kilik, arms sliding from their shoulders. He drains the rest of his root beer in one pull and then crushes the can in his hand, chucking it across the room to the recycling bin.

“It is to some people,” he says shortly.

“The town just likes to celebrate the first storm of the year,” Tsubaki says quickly. She's clearly hoping to head off any other questions, but Soul just doesn't understand why they're all being so weird about it. Maka is holding herself like she's going to break if she moves, and he needs to understand. 

“Oh,” Soul says. “So, what, is it happening soon or something? Is it some sort of special storm, or—”

“It's nothing we need to talk about right now,” Maka says sharply. She sets her unopened root beer down on the counter like she might throw it if she doesn't get it out of her hands. “You can watch it yourself in a couple days if you're so damn interested, but I'd like to go back to other stuff, if that's okay.”

“Okay,” Soul says, taken aback. “That's fine. Calm your tits.” He tries on a smile, attempting to steer them back to the joking tone they all had before. “Your tiny tits, that is.”

It's far from the worst thing he's said to her or vice versa; trading insults is pretty much part of their meetings by the dock. But this time Maka goes white for a split second, and then flushes a blotchy, brick red.

“You said you didn't—” she hisses furiously, cutting herself off with a quick glance at the other three. It hits Soul like a brick in the face; she thinks he's being a dick and referencing last night's clusterfuck. What was meant to be a harmless joke suddenly seems like a deliberate attack.

“I—I didn't mean—sorry, I—”

“Forget it,” Maka says.  “I—have to go. To the bathroom. Screw you.”

She shoves past him and out of the room, the sound of her storming upstairs coming a few seconds later. Soul is frozen to the floor. Black*Star, Tsubaki, and Kilik are staring at him.

“Okaaay,” Black*Star says slowly.

“I'm gonna go too, I think,” Soul says. He feels a little sick and confused and he just wants to get back to his cottage. The entire day has flipped on a dime and he's managed to sour everything the way he always does. “Not to the bathroom, I mean, just—home. I've got things to do. Music things.”

“Right,” says Tsubaki.

“Good luck on your polyamorous...thing,” Soul says, gesturing vaguely as he sidesteps towards the door.

“What?” Kilik says. Tsubaki makes a sharp, throat-cutting motion and Soul remembers that they hadn't exactly told Kilik they were wooing him yet. Today is apparently his day to ruin all sorts of things.

“Nothing!” he says. “I'm just going. Thanks for basketball! Nice to meet you! Bye!”

When he gets outside the sun from the morning is gone, the sky thick and overcast. He doesn't run home, but it's a near thing. The clouds seem to follow him all the way through the suburbs and down the main streets of town, rolling huge and grey just behind him. As he peels down the sidewalk through crowds of tourists, brightly coloured umbrellas pop open all around him, bursting up like a highspeed film of a field of flowers blooming. The rain starts just as he leaves the main road for the dirt path down to his cottage, and he gets soaked in the seconds it takes him to get to the porch.

He'd forgotten about the mess he left inside that morning, and when he opens the door he has to lean against the frame for a moment, weak with the sudden surge of despair crashing over him. He takes a couple deep breaths, closing his eyes. He's dripping a puddle of water onto his door mat. The ocean rages behind him.

He goes inside his cottage and closes the door.


	3. trace our steps to a great unknown (part a)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> remember when i said this would be only three parts? i sort of lied--the third part is posted in two sections, this being the first. the second part will come tomorrow.

“Well someone's looking moody today!”

Soul groans into the wooden post he's currently got his forehead pressed up against. “Fuck off, Patti.” 

“Ruuuude,” she drawls. “Just trying to look out for my coworker.'

Soul pries an eye open and glares at her. “Thanks, but no thanks.” 

They're both in the back room, avoiding the crowd still in the pub under the pretense of getting more napkins (Soul) and sweeping the floor (Patti). Soul's head has been throbbing for the past half hour like there's someone in there using the inside of his skull as a gong. He's off work in about twenty minutes, and he's sort of trying to skulk back here until he can leave. 

“You've been acting like someone took a shit in your food all evening,” Patti says bluntly.

“What, so I've been puking all over everyone?” Soul scoffs. “That was a stupid analogy.”

Patti prods him in the leg with the end of her broom. “Don't judge my ways of speaking, piano prick.”

Soul laughs, a little unwillingly, and Patti grins.

“Which reminds me,” she continues. “When are we going to get to hear some of your music? On the rare occasions that you bother talking to us, it's the only thing you talk about.” 

Apart from possibly Maka, who hadn't shown up at the dock last night, music is the last thing Soul wants to talk about. This morning he spent hours trying to piece together some of his soundscape for a song, but he doesn't have a proper set of drums to record any decent sounding percussion with. All he could do was track out his planned percussion section using electronic drums on his laptop, but it doesn't sound how it's supposed to, how he wants it to. And without that, nothing else seemed to sound right. It was like fighting with Maka had sapped all of the power out of the music, and he was left with disconnected ocean sounds and some lame recorded chords on a keyboard.

“Never,” Soul says. “I'm going to become a bartender full-time.”

Patti snorts. “You're not even a bartender here. You're like...an assistant bartender or something because Liz says you don't have the serving whatchamacallit license thing to make drinks.”

“She let me make a gin and tonic when it was really busy once,” Soul mutters. Being around Patti either has the effect of making him feel much older and more mature, or making him feel like a kid again. Today, it's clearly the latter.

“Gin and tonic,” Patti says. “Real difficult. Are you gonna sign up to play something for tomorrow?”

“What's happening tomorrow?” Soul asks. There's a sinking feeling in his stomach that tells him he already knows.

“Everyone's pretty certain it'll be the storm,” Patti says, her eyes flashing with excitement. “I mean, it rained yesterday afternoon and it was grey all today—just like every year. Storm will be tomorrow for sure. So there'll be a sort of open mic festival thing during it and there'll be stalls and food and—”

Soul shoves away from the post, a strange surge of anger swelling up in him.

“Why is everyone in this weird island obsessed with this storm?” Soul grits out. “Like, storms are not nice things! You could die if you're outside in a storm! Get like...pneumonia! Or get electrocuted! Why the fuck is a storm a cause for celebration?”

“Die?” Patti laughs. “Don't be stupid.” Her eyes are clear now, bright and serious. “The island is protected.”

Soul stares at her. “Protected?”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Liz comes hurtling around the corner, looking about ready to murder someone. “It does not take that long to get napkins! Some 40 year old tourist man just decided he wanted  to get a little too friendly with his waitress Jackie and now Kim is going to be arrested for murder if one of you doesn't get out there and pull her off him!”

Patti's entire face lights up with a vicious sort of excitement.

“I'm on it!” she growls with satisfaction. She charges out of back room with the broom held like a javelin. Soul closes his eyes and slumps back against the post.

Liz sighs loudly, making no move to follow her sister. “This is why coworkers should not be allowed to date.”

“I'm pretty certain Kim would still beat up creepy old men even if she wasn't dating the person they were being creepy towards,” Soul says.

“I know,” Liz replies, clearly frustrated. “It's just—we throw them out of the pub for sure, but we don't knock their teeth out first! Even if they deserve it! I mean, I don't wanna have to try and get blood stains out of the wood floors! They're stained enough as it is!”

“Sorry,” Soul says.

“Shut up, it's not your fault,” she says. “Assholes will be assholes.”

“Did Kim really knock out his teeth?”

Liz cracks a tiny smile. “Not sure, but I think she broke one of his fingers.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Liz rubs a hand over her face slowly, starting to drift back towards the front of the pub. Soul grabs a stack of napkins and follows her.

“God, I'm so happy we're closed tomorrow,” she says.

“We are?” Soul asks. “I thought I had an evening shift.”

“You did, but that was before it became clear the storm was tomorrow. Everything closes on storm day,” Liz explains.

Soul almost throws the napkins on the ground. Nothing about this “storm” makes any sense to him and the very idea of it is starting to piss him off and terrify him at the same time. Everyone treats it like it's ordinary, like it's something awesome even, except for Maka and Black*Star, who hadn't wanted to talk about it at all. What do they know that no one else does?

Liz checks her watch. “You might as well just head out,” she says. “You've only got like five more minutes left, and you look kind of terrible, no offence. Just bring the napkins out and you're good to go.”

“Thank you,” Soul says, with great feeling. “I am done with this day.”

“I know what you mean.”

Patti is buffing the bar when they come back out to the front, looking monumentally pleased with herself. Kim and Jackie are huddled in a corner, talking in quiet voices, and the crowd has mostly died down (probably chased away by Kim nearly eviscerating someone). It's easily manageable for the four girls left, and Soul doesn't feel bad about restocking the napkins and punching out as fast as he can.

The sky above is a flat black when he gets outside, all of the stars hidden by clouds. At the end of the street he thinks he sees Black*Star, and for a split second he thinks about calling out, asking him...something. But then the figure is gone, ducking in between two houses. Soul continues on to his cottage.

The air is summer warm, but he still feels cold, even once he gets inside. He doesn't bother turning on the lights—it's midnight and he's going to go to bed soon. He peels his clothing off in the darkness and dumps them in a pile on one of his chairs, before groping for the comforter off of his bed and wrapping it around his shivering shoulders. He plunks himself down in the other chair and pulls his laptop to him, starting it up.

When he first decided to come here to this island, it had been in the middle of an argument with his parents about dropping out and what he could possibly do now with his worthless life. Soul had screamed it out—not “Shibusen”, because he didn't even remember the name of the island his classmate had told him about—screamed that he knew exactly where he was going and that it would be exactly the right place. He'd looked up only enough about the island to find a place to rent and figure out how to get there. He'd never looked at why people come here, what this island's claims to fame are. Sitting now in front of his computer, he thinks it's finally time for him to figure that out. 

He types “Shibusen Island storms” into google and waits. The top three results are a video entitled “sick lightning at shibusen!!”, the wikipedia article for the island, and then finally a link to a specific page of the island's tourism site. Soul stares, mouse hovering over the third link: it's called “Shibusen Storms: The Legend of the Water Spirits”.

Something squirms sickly in his gut and he clicks on it. It's just starting to load when there's a crack of sound at his door. He jumps and slams the laptop shut, heart racing. 

“Soul?”

He surges up out of his chair, almost jamming his thigh into the edge of the table, and hobbles to the door to pull it open. On his porch is Maka, barefoot and bare-shouldered, wrapped in the blanket he'd hung on the railing this morning to dry after it was caught in the rain. She's shivering and not quite looking at him.

“Maka?” he says slowly. “What are you—what—”

“Can I come in?” she says quietly. “I just—I just need—”

“Yes, yeah, sure,” Soul stammers, moving aside so she can drift in. He closes the door behind her and fumbles for the light switch; the whole cottage is illuminated with a sputter of dirty light, the whole mess and clutter and tininess of it all. She stands in the centre of the room, taking it all in, and he feels stupid and desperate and worried.

“Do you want to borrow some of my clothes?”

“No,” she says. “Unless you want your blanket back. Sorry, I just don't have any of my own clothes stashed near your house and I needed something—” She takes a deep, shuddering breath. “Had a fight with my dad. Thought of seeing you. I don't know. It was dumb.”

“It wasn't, it wasn't, it's—it's cool,” Soul says. “Do you wanna talk about it?”

She shakes her head. “Can you play me something?”

“I—yeah,” Soul says. “Just—here, take this.”

He swings the comforter off of his shoulders and hands it to her before grabbing his sweater off the chair and pulling it back on. He's very aware of the pull of his body, of the flashes of bare skin he's presenting to her before he gets covered. God, he's in his boxers, skinny legs galore. He's probably the most uncool thing she's ever seen.

Maka sits down on his bed and draws her legs up, snuggling into the comforter until only her head is poking out. She looks so different than anytime he's seen her before—sallow and tense where she's usually bright and confident. Soul pulls his empty chair away from his laptop and sets it down so he's facing Maka when he sits, pulling his guitar into his hands. 

“Play the song you were writing when I met you,” Maka says. “The one you said was you.”

He does what he's told.

His fingers are cold and wooden on the strings at first, but Maka sits back and listens anyway. The world outside the windows is pitch black, broken up only by the reflections of the inside of the cottage, and it feels like there's nothing else but the two of them and these four walls. He plays the song that had once been about him and now is about her too. He plays and plays, looping back into the beginning of the song when it gets close to the end, and watches as Maka's expression loosens, her entire body sinking into the comforter.

He stops when her eyes slip shut, and she pries one open to fix him with an odd, intent look. 

“I thought you were falling asleep,” he whispers.

“I am,” she murmurs. “Can I? Just for a little bit?”

“Sleep?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure.”

She closes her eye again and squirms around on his bed until she's lying down properly on her side, the comforter spread out over the bed the way it's supposed to be. Soul puts down his guitar as quietly as possible and sits there like an idiot for a moment. He darts a glance at his laptop, sitting safe and closed on the table.

“Come here,” Maka says. “Stop brooding over there like a loser and just sleep.”

Soul stares at her; it's a good thing she's facing the wall because he's pretty sure the look on his face is really stupid.

“I'm sorry about the other day,” he blurts.

“Yeah, you should be,” she says, her voice muffled. “Jerk.” A pause. “Now get over here. My back is cold.”

Soul stands up, hovering for a moment between the chair and the bed. His head is full of cotton wool and Maka is an oblong lump under his covers. He pulls off his sweater again and lets it fall to the ground before carefully lifting the comforter and sliding onto the bed. It's not made for two people to fit in it, and as soon as he gets in he's bumping up against her. Feeling huge and clumsy, he lies down on his side, his back pressed to hers, knees pointing off the edge of the bed, both of them curled up in mirror images of each other.

“You know,” he says quietly, when they've been silent long enough that he's not sure if she is still awake. “I came here because of a fight with my dad.”

It takes a second, but her voice is clear when it comes out of the darkness. “What do you mean?”

“I'd fucked up,” Soul says. “I felt weird and out of place at the fancy music college the whole family had gone to for like...three generations, so I dropped out. Brought shame to the family, apparently. So I basically decided to move here just so I could tell him I did have a plan and that he could stuff it.”

Maka laughs, a small vibration against his back. “So it's a fluke you're here now?”

“I don't think so,” Soul says.He doesn't know how to say more than that, how to explain how much he needs this island to be where he’s meant to be.                                                                                                                                   

They're quiet for a long moment, the rhythm of breathing pushing them together and apart by inches, ribcages expanding into each other's space. Maka shifts and the rough grain of the blanket from outside that she's still wearing digs into Soul's skin. 

“A lot of the time,” Maka says softly. “I wonder if I hate my dad.” A shaky breath. “I know I don't, but I wonder anyway.”

Soul can tell it took a lot out of her to say it, and he waits for a moment before asking, “What did you fight about?”

“It doesn't matter,” she says. “Similar things to you, I guess, though a little reversed. Important dad talking about duty, but with me it's—he doesn't want to let me do things I know I can do.”

“Trying to control you by limiting you instead of forcing you to do things.”

“Yeah.”

“That sucks.”

“It just makes me mad when he acts like that because—because when I was a kid he was always cheating on my mum and sleeping around and that's why she left him and us, and now he acts like he's got the right to have so much input on my life—” She exhales sharply. “It's just frustrating.”

“That...that definitely sucks,” Soul says pathetically.

He doesn't know what else to say, but she doesn't seem to be expecting anything else. She makes a humming noise in her throat and then suddenly she's turning, curling up behind him with her forehead at the nape of his neck and the backs of her wrists pressing warm against his spine. His whole body goes stiff for a long, tense second, and then he's melting, unable to stop it, relaxing into the two tiny points of contact between them.

“Thank you for playing for me,” Maka whispers.

“I'll always play for you,” Soul says, feeling crazily reckless and honest just lying here beside her. “Whenever you ask.”

There's a pause, strangely long.

“I'll remember that,” she says.

He's not sure when they fall asleep after that or how long they sleep for; all he knows is that he opens his eyes an unspecified, hazy amount of time later, feeling an absence on the bed, and looks up to see Maka silhouetted in front of his window, gazing out at the ocean.

“Maka?” he murmurs.

She glances back at him over her shoulder, her face in shadow.

“I didn't mean to wake you,” she says.

“S'okay,” Soul replies sleepily. “What are you doing?”

“We should go for a swim,” Maka says, looking back out the window.

“Now?”

“Yeah.”

“But it's—won't it be cold?”

“No. Around here the water stays warm through the night in the summer.”

She turns around fully, and he still can't see her face, but somehow he's sure he's looking right into her eyes.

“Come on,” she says.

It's darker outside than Soul would've thought possible, somehow blacker than when they had gone to sleep. They stumble down to the edge of the water, Soul in his boxers and Maka with the blanket around her like a tube dress. Everything is narrowed down to touch and sound: the grit of the sand against his bare feet, the shush of the waves pulling at the edge of the beach. Maka holds his hand as they wade in next to the dock, the water lapping at their legs. She was right: it's warm. Soul has goosebumps anyway.

Maka stops walking when the water gets just past her knees, slipping her hand out of Soul's. She bunches her fists in the blanket, holding the hem up so it doesn't get wet. She hesitates like that for a moment and then shucks it off completely in one shadowy sweep of material, tossing it onto the dock. Soul is paralyzed, eyes stuck to her face. Maka meets his gaze for one heart-stopping second, and then dives straight into the water.

She pops out with a splash about twenty feet away, a dark smudge on the water.

“Are you coming in?” she asks.

“Do I have to?” Soul says. He's partially joking—because god, he wants to get to where she is—but partially not. It feels like they're maybe on the edge of something, but he doesn't know what, and doesn't even know what he did right or wrong or just...did...to get himself here. He doesn't know anything.

“You've been watching me swim around for weeks,” Maka says. “And I've never seen you give it a try. Are you coming?”

“I—”

“Or maybe you're too scared,” Maka says.

She's only teasing—she has no idea how close to the truth it is. There's a white-hot rush through Soul's tight chest and he hooks his thumbs into the waistband of his boxers.

“Fuck that,” he calls, and peels them off, one leg at a time. His hands keep fumbling, and he almost falls over at one point, but she doesn't laugh, and he feels better than he thought he would once he's naked. He doesn't feel like he's going to have a heart attack, at least, even though she's definitely looking in his direction, and it's definitely not dark enough that she can't see anything at all.

He tosses his boxers onto Maka's blanket and sinks into the water, half paddling, half-walking up to Maka. The ground slips away from his feet as he goes, and by the time he's a metre away from her he's treading water, sending ripples out to bump up against her collarbones. His eyes have adjusted, and he can see her face now properly, can meet her gaze. 

“So you _can_ swim,” she says.

“Obviously,” Soul counters, shaky and nervous. “Why would I move to an island if I couldn't swim?”

“I don't know,” Maka says. “Lots of people do crazy things.”

“Says the water spirit.”

“Hey!” She sends a wave of water up to splash his face without even moving her arms; Soul splutters and almost slips underwater. “Water spirits aren't a crazy thing around here. No type of spirit is.”

“Wait,” Soul says. “There are other types of spirits?”

She shrugs. “Come on, let's race.”

She vanishes under the surface, as fast as if she was sucked down, and Soul spins in a clumsy circle, waiting for her to appear somewhere.

“Race to where?” he calls. “Cheater!”

There's a touch at his waist, cool fingers pressing into the dip of it, and he almost screams, whirling around. Maka pops up right in front of him, barely a foot away, wet and grinning. He can feel one of her knees brushing against the front of his with every other kick and it's so distracting that he's distantly worried he'll forget to swim and will start drowning instead.

“Maka Albarn does not cheat,” she says primly. “And it's a touch race. You chase me.”

She's gone again, shoving off with a hand on the centre of his chest.

“You want to play tag?” Soul says. This time there's no vocal answer, just a stream of bubbles churning up out of the water off to his far left and popping one by one. Soul swallows a laugh and takes a deep breath; if he's “it”, he's going after her.

Diving into the water fully is like being plunged into black ink—he's completely blind, arms and legs working together to push him in the direction he was facing before he went under. He's about to kick up to surface again and try to get his bearings when he sees a flash of hazy pale feet just in front of him and reaches out. He grabs her ankle and hears, clear as a bell: “Sucker!” And then she's kicking out of his grip and the pressure in his lungs is forcing him to the surface.

“I still caught you!” he yells, as soon as he sucks in some air. She bursts out of the water a couple feet away, still laughing.

“Yeah, but I got away,” she says.

“It's tag, not kidnapping,” Soul argues. “Can you—can you speak underwater?”

“Of course I can,” she replies. “I live underwater, idiot.”

“Do it again,” he says, ducking back under the surface. He keeps his eyes closed this time, floating in the same spot until he hears Maka's voice somewhere off behind his right shoulder. It sounds somehow different than it does in the air, smoother, like the water evens out all the rough patches.

“Over here!” she says.

He turns and swims clumsily towards the sound of her voice.

“Getting close,” she sing-songs. “Almost...almost there.”

Just when he's sure he's about to reach her, fingers stretched and searching, there's a swell of water pushing him back and up, making him burst, spluttering, into the air. He sinks back underwater for a second before he can get his legs under him properly to tread water, and then he's shaking his hair out of his face and yelling, “Unfair!”

“Tag doesn't have rules,” she says, shooting up beside him. “At least, it doesn't with water spirits.”

“Well, maybe go easy on the human here!” Soul squawks indignantly. 

She swims a little closer, and Soul swallows, thinking to himself that it's a lot easier to ignore the whole “naked” thing when she's not right there, all of her wet skin less than a metre away. He wishes distantly that there was some way for him to cover his dick while still treading water—although it doesn't really matter, since she probably saw it when he took off his boxers. God, that's not what he needs to be thinking right now.

“What's it like being human?” she asks, absentmindedly swimming around him. “Like, does it feel weird to be in the water? I know I've got loads of human friends, but I don't think I've ever really asked that.”

“No,” says Soul. “Just...different than being on land. Takes more effort because we have to save our breath if we want to be underwater, and we have to be constantly moving to stay afloat. You're lucky—it's not like that with you being dryside. You were fine the other day.”

“We can't be dryside permanently though,” Maka says. “We won't like...dry out or something, but we sort of wilt away if we don't spend at least half of our time in the water.”

“What, so you could live in the city but have to sleep in a full bathtub or something?”

“We need ocean or lake water, so no.”

“So you could never leave the ocean for good if you wanted to?” Soul asks. “Doesn't that suck?”

“Are you kidding?” she laughs. “There's so much fucking cool shit in the ocean that I'm not even allowed to tell you guys about. There's stuff you've never seen because the water pressure would kill you if you tried to get down there. There's stuff that's so classified that it'll take me years to get clearance to learn about it or go see it.”

“Clearance?”

“There's bureaucracies underwater too. But I'm going to get that clearance one day and help discover and fight new sea creatures and spirits.”

“You're going to fight them?” Soul laughs. “I mean, I have no doubt that you could beat them, but why? Is that one of your mission statements or whatever?”

“When you get really deep in the ocean,” Maka whispers, widening her eyes for effect. “Everything wants to kill you.”

“So if we got deep enough you might want to kill me too?”

“Nah, you'd already be dead,” she answers. “Water pressure. Human skull. Ka-boom.”

“Or,” he says, stifling a yawn. “I might be the one gunning to kill you.”

“Good luck with that,” she laughs.

The late hour is starting to catch up with him and he's getting tired. He's sinking lower in the water, his feet forgetting to kick; they want to drift down, want to search for a surface to rest upon. The water is pulling at him—it gets as far as his chin before Maka's hands are wet and warm on his waist, supporting him.

“Don't go drowning on me,” she says softly.

“Sorry,” he says, blinking at her.

“Time's up, probably,” she says. “You've got to go to sleep and I need to get back. I really shouldn't have stayed away this long, I've got...preparations and stuff.”

“Oh,” says Soul. He has the distant feeling that there was a chance for him to do or say something and he's completely missed it. She's right in front of him, and they're both bare, but he's fading fast, and he's lost what might have been in his mind ten minutes ago.

“Thanks for swimming with me,” she says. “For all of this. It's funny, but you—you remind me why I do this, why—why protecting the island is important.” He has no idea what to say to that, but she doesn't seem to need an answer, because she rushes to speak again. “I need to get back.”

“Will I see you tomorrow?” Soul asks.

She takes her hands off his waist, and his skin misses her touch as soon as it's gone. “No. But...maybe after that.” She smiles at him, small but sincere. “This is just me needing to go home. I'm not saying goodbye.”

She hesitates, and for a split second, staring at her so close, Soul is convinced that she's going to kiss him, or he's going to lose it and kiss her. But all she does is bring her hand softly down in a little karate chop on his head, just a tap of contact.

“You should sleep in,” she says. And then she's disappearing into the water.

Soul stays floating there for a moment longer, just in case it's another game and she's not gone yet, but when the water stays as still as glass he turns back to the shore and swims until he can touch the bottom and walk again. He drags himself up the sand and into the house before he remembers the blanket and boxers on the dock. He thinks about going back for them, then dismisses it; he's too tired, and if they fall into the sea, well, the sea can take them just like it took his shoes.

There's a distant memory in the back of his head, something about laptops and lightning and fear that was there before Maka turned up, but he figures whatever it is, he can deal with it in the morning. He faceplants on his bed and lets sleep swallow him up like the mouth of a frightened whale.


	4. trace our steps to a great unknown (part b)

The entire world is shaking.

Soul is trapped behind giant teeth and he's being jumped and jostled all over the place, vibrated out of his skull. There is a horrifying noise all around him, a roar emanating from somewhere behind. He opens his mouth to scream but the sound gets ripped apart in his chest, juddering out of him in weak, tiny pieces. There is a shift—above or below or around him, and he's falling, falling past the teeth and into the open air— 

He lands with a thump on the cottage floor, and his eyes fly open. The wooden slats are shuddering under his touch ever so slightly, and the sound all around him is so loud that it takes him a minute to place it as music—there's music, something he's heard piped on the streets, but ten times louder, being blasted from somewhere.

He sits up, disoriented, and registers that he's naked. Last night comes rushing back all at once—Maka coming to him, upset, them talking and sleeping and then swimming together. He fumbles for the clock on his bedside table—slowly dancing towards the edge with the force of the sound shaking it—and sees that it's after noon. He's slept in, and he's remembering what today is: the storm.

Soul gets dressed as fast as he can and throws open his door, stumbling outside and staring around.

It's even louder outside, music echoing out over the pitch of swirling wind. The ocean is disturbingly still, as if it's dead, but the sky above is pulsing, bulbous clumps of cloud swelling and building like something living. They're moving as fast as a time-lapse video, pushing and crackling against each other, and it's like nothing he's ever seen before.

“What the fuck,” Soul says distantly. He can barely hear his own voice.

When he looks at the water again, he realizes the level is much higher than normal; it's eaten away half of the sand. It appears smooth and still, but when he looks closer he can see that it's slowly climbing up the slope of the beach. It's almost lapping at the bottom of the dock, and Soul wonders crazily if this was why the cottage was so cheap to rent; if it doesn't stop advancing, the water is going to be spilling into his home in another twenty minutes.

The only thing in his head is that he's gotta figure out what's going on, and he's got to get to higher ground. Soul wheels around and starts running up into town.

The music gets louder as he runs, and when he gets to the edge of town there are tourists everywhere, staring up at the clouds, chattering in tight, excited voices, nervousbut sure somehow, with their guidebooks clutched in hand, that everything is going to be fine. Soul pushes through them, and when he turns onto the main road he can see that the biggest crowd has gathered in the centre of town,where there's a makeshift stage and enormous speakers jutting out over everything. The band onstage are just finishing up a song and Soul runs towards the crowd, desperate to find Tsubaki or Black*Star or someone who can tell him what he needs to know.

“Shibusen!” booms out a voice over the speakers. A cheer goes up in the crowd, and Soul looks up to see the mayor standing on the stage beside the band, wearing that weird black cloak he always seems to have on. “Hi! Hello! Welcome to Storm Day!”

A girl next to Soul almost elbows him in the face, and he stops trying to squeeze through the crush of people, instead standing on his toes to look around. It's not that big of a town, even with the tourists; someone he knows should be around here somewhere.

“That's it for my introduction,” says the mayor. “Now here is my son to tell you about today's events.”

The sky above gives a dangerous rumble as he passes the mic over to Kid, the pale man who gave Soul his tour of the town. The crowd gasps and starts gazing up at the sky, and Kid has to clear his throat twice into the mic to get their attention.

“As the coordinator of the Storm celebrations for this year,” he says proudly, clearly prepared for this speech. “It is my honour to welcome you all to our island and to let you know the itinerary. The lightning should be starting any minute now, and we will have a viewing section on the cliffs for anyone who would like a more vivid look. There will be music performed here continuously throughout the storm, and it will be audible throughout the island although you may certainly stay here in the town square if you wish to feel more safe. Remember, the island is protected; no one will come to any harm today. That being said, we would like to remind you that if you have epilepsy or issues with constant flashing, it would be best for you to stay inside during the duration of the storm. The group heading towards the cliffs will be leaving now, so if you would like to come, just follow me.”

He climbs down off the stage and the crowd starts shifting, the music starting up again. Soul is stuck standing in the middle of the swarm of people, frozen still, hearing the words “the island is protected” echo again and again in his head. He's heard it before—heard it a few times phrased just like that,and finally he makes the connection.

This is part of Maka's job then, he thinks. Dealing with this storm and making it safe for everyone is part of what she and the other water spirits do. If it's part of her job...if years have passed and this island has had storm after storm with nothing bad happening, then it should be fine, right? There's no reason he should feel as scared as he does about it all, but no matter how many times he tells himself that, it keeps coiling up like a nest of snakes in his mind, waiting to strike.

The crowd thins out considerably as the bulk of the tourists make their way to the cliff spot. Soon all that's left is fifty or so people watching the band or talking amongst each other. Soul stares blankly up at the stage for a solid minute before he realizes that the drummer is Kilik, and that he keeps glancing at a tall lady in the front row who is holding the hands of two toddlers.

Tsubaki.

Soul takes two steps blindly towards her, stopping when three women cross in front of him, chattering away, barely audible over the music.

“I totally think Edward should've come with us,” says one of them, peering through her guidebook. “He's so morbid; the little story they have here of human sacrifice would be right up his alley.”

“Well, they get away with it by making their legend have 'spirits', don't they?” says another. “Less shocking to the general public, I assume.”

Soul's heart gives a vicious squeeze in his chest.

“Um, excuse me,” he says, worming his way in front of the woman with the guidebook. “What legend are you referring to?”

“Oh, it's here in the guidebook,” she says, tilting her book closer to him and laying a finger on the page so he can follow what she's reading. “Apparently the 'mystical phenomenon of the enormous yearly storm leaving the island untouched is caused by the water spirits who live all around the island and take care of it. Every twenty years the daughter of the current chief is sacrificed to the weather gods in order to ensure that the spirits have the power they need to protect the island for the next two decades.” She laughs shortly and Soul hears it as if at a distance. “It's crazy, isn't it? Tourist places always have gimmicks like these.”

“It's probably magnets or something controlling the storm,” says someone else.

“Uh, thanks,” Soul says faintly. Things are falling into place in his head, bits and pieces that he never thought to line up next to each other before. Maka saying her dad was someone “important” and that she's just gotten promoted after her twentieth birthday, Maka not wanting to talk about the storm, Tsubaki saying Maka deserved happiness and relaxation because they were running out of time—

Soul turns and stumbles through the crowd, eyes fixed on Tsubaki's long black hair. There is no word to categorize the roaring in his ears—he isn't feeling anything right now. He's hollow, and the storm is happening inside him. Onstage the guitarist sinks to his knees, fingers ripping up a sound that climbs higher and higher in dizzying waves against Soul's skull. He bursts through a group of people and claps a hand on Tsubaki's shoulder, yanking her around.

“You knew, didn't you?” he says.

“What?” says Tsubaki, eyebrows pulling together.

“Where is Maka right now?” he asks, voice tight.

“She's doing her job,” Tsubaki says, and she's so...so calm about it that Soul can't take it.

“How can you fucking say that?” he hisses. “How can you just say that while she goes out there and—”

“Soul!” Tsubaki says, pulling the toddlers—Fire and Thunder, probably—closer to her knees and covering their ears. “Maka is choosing to be out there, what right do you have—”

“I can't—” Soul bites out. Words are failing him. The kids are shooting wide-eyed stares up at him, like he's a monster or something, and god, he feels like one right now, like he could rip apart the world. He backs away from Tsubaki, shaking his head, unable to believe anything that is happening. “I can't—I can't just stand here.”

“Soul!”

He turns and plunges through the crowd, running back the way he came as fast as he can, faces blurring past like distorted masks in a carnival funhouse. None of it makes sense, and he runs until he's free of the crowds, until he can see the sea in the distance. The sky snarls above, churning black and horrifying, and he runs faster.

No wonder Black*Star hadn't wanted to talk about the storm, Soul realizes. Maka is his best friend, and maybe Tsubaki can take the view that Maka is choosing this of her own free will, but Black*Star is the type of person to want to smash down any sort of thing he perceives as evil. And god, last night—was this what she had fought about with her father? Did he not want her to go through with it?

All that talk about discovering more of the ocean must have been her pretending, saying what she would have done had she had the chance. She'd said it wasn't goodbye, but it was clear now that last night had been exactly that. And he can't just leave it at that.

He's only just turned onto the path that leads to his cottage when a fork of brilliant purple lightning plunges down into the sea ahead of him and the whole world goes white for a weightless, humming moment. Thunder rumbles up from all around, loud enough to shake the ground even more than the music; Soul is knocked off his feet, sprawling backwards onto the gravel. Sharp stones score lines on the flesh of his hands and elbows and his head is whipped back and—and he can see the sky above him starting to come apart. The clouds are black, lightning spitting down like gunfire, like spears, like whips, cracking constant and jagged all around him. The thunder is a pulse in his bones, rooting him terrified to the ground. It feels like the end of the world, and he can't move, expecting to get struck any second by a bolt of lightning.

He lies there on the ground, waiting for death, and it doesn't come. The storm is raging on, but he slowly comes to realize that there's no rain or lightning actually near him, and he realizes that he can't even feel any wind. He gathers every tiny bit of courage he has and sits up slowly, then climbs to his feet to look around.

He stops breathing.

“The island is protected,” everyone had said, over and over. They never said how, or what they really meant, but standing there Soul can finally see it.

The lightning is streaking down from the sky all around him, but it's hitting only the water, creating a flashing, electric cage encircling the whole island. Directly above the island the clouds are dark and angry, but dormant all the same—all the danger is missing the island itself. For a split second, all he feels is awe, the fear retreating somewhere into his heart. This is what the water spirits can do for the islanders, this is their power—to completely divert all the lightning onto the water instead of the land.

And then he remembers that this peace has been assured by the sacrifice of some innocent girl twenty years ago, and that continued safety means Maka's death. And the fear is back.

In the distance the tourists are shrieking with surprise and joy and the music is a steadying beat even over the sound of the thunder. Soul looks back towards the town he's started to think of as his own and lets himself take it in for just a moment, the music settling something in his chest. Then he turns and runs down the path to his cottage. To the sea.

The water level is a foot away from the stairs to the cottage and the dock is gone, swallowed by the endless sweep of churning ocean. Soul doesn't pause, splashing into the water and pushing forward even as it soaks his shorts, splattering up onto his chest and his face, bone-chillingly cold, like the lightning has sucked all of the warmth out of it.

“Maka!” he yells. He's got to talk to her, make her see that she doesn't have to do this, that the island can survive the storm and she can survive with it. The water is getting deeper, waves crashing against his chest and shoving him backwards. His shoes sink and struggle to find grip against the sand and he pushes forward, pushes forward.

The closest spot where he sees lightning hitting is maybe twenty feet from where the dock would have ended if it was still visible. With each strike the water reaches up to meet it, like hands forcing it back, and Soul knows if he gets far enough out, the spirits will hear him. Maka will hear him. The air sizzles with electricity, and panic works with the waves, trying to keep him back—how far can he go? Is he going to get struck, is he—

“Maka!” he shouts again. “Maka, you don't have to do this, Maka please don't—”

His foot slips and he goes under, the cold crush of water paralyzing him for a horrifying, liquid moment. His mouth is open; water floods in, and when he surfaces again he's choking, flailing for a foothold. He's never been a strong swimmer—he's never been a strong anything, not a musician, not a student, not a person. He can hear muffled voices somewhere behind him, cutting in and out like performers with faulty mics, yelling his name. He doesn't know if Tsubaki followed him or if it's someone else, but he doesn't look back. He's come too far, and he's doing this.

The ground is gone and he dives forward, swimming straight into the blackness of the ocean. The beat of the music is pounding in his ears even over the ever-present thunder, and he focuses on that instead of the mind-stopping fear. He can't feel his arms or his legs really anymore, and swimming with his head above the water is almost impossible with the waves constantly crashing on his face. The horizon keeps pitching and rolling in front of him; he catches glimpses of his surroundings in the trough between the waves, and then they're gone, wiped from him with the curling slap of water on his body. He surges forward, because he can't do anything else, and screams Maka's name.

There's a split second where he's at the top of a wave and the ocean is spread out in front of him—no horizon separating the water and the sky, just a deep curve of blackness as far as he can see— and in the white flash of lightning he thinks he sees the familiar head and shoulders of a spirit out in the water.

Soul opens his mouth and the wind that he couldn't feel on the island comes all at once, throwing him down into the icy water. He flails his way back to the top, catching one shallow breath of air before there's rain hammering down on his face and the waves are rolling him under again. Maka, he thinks. I have to keep going, I have to—

There's no up and no down anymore. His mouth is still open and he's swallowing automatically, so, so afraid that it feels like he's swallowing down the whole world. It's too dark underwater. It's too dark.

****

There's pain in his chest and on his arm and he's being pulled by the arm. He's floating through space, blown into a million pieces, and the pain and the pull is all that's real.

He's thinks someone's saying something, but he can't hear anything except for the music.

****

Suddenly, Soul is awake, with an unknown chunk of time missing from his brain. He's lying down. Something is dripping down onto his face, and he's coughing. It feels like his lungs are going to turn inside out.

“—stupid, fucking idiot! What were you doing, how could you, how could you do that?”

Soul's pretty sure the voice is aiming at him, but he can't defend himself because he can't breathe. His insides are made of liquid, and the coughing isn't doing anything. He tries to say something, anything, but then there's more swearing above him and the unmistakable feel of a mouth pressing to his. Lips are prying his apart, and then—then the person sucks, or does something, and the water in Soul's chest flows up his throat and directly out of his mouth into the stranger's. The sensation is disgusting, and when the lips move away from his own Soul instantly starts coughing again, his whole body cringing around the sudden emptiness in him.

“What the fuck,” he croaks.

His head wrenches to the side, cheek burning.

“What the fuck?” repeats the voice, slightly hysterical. As his senses return, he's slowly realizing that there's something familiar about the sound. “I should be saying what the fuck!  As in what the fuck were you doing out there?”

Soul opens his eyes, and Maka's above him, hazy and whole and alive, her hand raised like she's going to hit him again. He can sense a few other people hovering beyond, but he doesn't bother to look, focusing instead on her. Water is dripping from her face onto his, and he smiles weakly, stupidly glad to see her.

“I was trying to save you,” he says hoarsely.

She looks like she's going to spit fire. “Save me? Are you—I'm doing my job, I don't need saving! I'm a water spirit, you're a human—you get hit with lightning, you're almost sure to die! You almost drowned, and I had to abandon my post to make sure you didn't! What if I didn't see you in time?”

“Sorry,” he says. “But it's okay. I didn't, and you're here now, and you're fine.”

“Yeah,” she says. “And you're going to stay here, and I'm going to go back and protect this damn island, because if I stay here much longer you really will have fucked everything up.”

She moves to stand, and Soul blinks up at her, blurting out, “No, you—what? You can't go back out there!”

It happens in an instant—there's a shout, Maka looks up, and then she's moving, impossibly fast, lunging into place just as a crack of lightning splits away from the rest and surges down towards them. Maka takes it through her hands and the electricity courses through her, turning her into a blaze of light for a split second. Then she's shoving it back up into the sky and staggering on the spot, smoking slightly.

“Maka!” Soul cries, struggling up onto his elbows. There are hands at his shoulders suddenly, holding him from sitting up any further, and he's too weak to fight against it. He can see now that he's been dragged up to the path to town, and that the storm is raging on in front of him.

Maka doesn't look back. “You guys take care of him. I've left a hole in the defense—I've gotta get back.”

And then she's running down the hill and back into the churning water. Soul lurches forward against the hands on his shoulder, yelling something—he's not even sure what—over the sound of Black*Star and Tsubaki's voices telling him that it's going to be okay, that it's fine. Tsubaki makes sense, but Black*Star?

“She can't go back out there,” Soul rasps. “She's gonna die, she's gonna get sacrificed—”

“Oh,” Black*Star breathes. “You dumb motherfucker.”

Everything goes black.

****

Soul's seated at a grand piano in a strange room. There's cheap jazz music coming from somewhere, but not from him; his hands lay flat on the keys. The room has no walls, only a circle of voluminous red curtains all around him, and the floor is shiny red and black tile. Occasionally the curtains move, twitching like there's some sort of power coursing through them.

There's a tiny red demon in a suit sitting on the piano.

“Well, you've fucked it up this time haven't you?” he says nasally.

“Shut up,” Soul says.

“Made a right cock out of yourself. The drop out wonder to the rescue.”

“Shut up.”

“Don't try to tell me this was all just over a girl, no matter how extraordinary. No, what was going on was you thought you were losing everything all over again for the third time—couldn't make an island full of murderers your home, and couldn't face the idea of trying to find another place after this, huh? Was that what you were doing out there? Not trying to save anyone, but just trying to kill yourself? End the failure?”

“Wes!”

There's a new voice, a child's, thin and scared, and Soul turns sharply. Behind him is a bed, and there's a sniffling, white-haired kid of maybe six or seven sitting up in it, rubbing at his eyes.

“Wes!” the kid cries. “I had that nightmare again!”

“Go back to sleep, Soul.”

Wes appears in the shadow of the curtains on the other side of the room. His face is blank, and he isn't the right age to match the Soul in the bed—he's as old as when Soul last saw him, at their parent's house before Soul left for the island. When he speaks, it's their father's voice.

“You'll wake up your brother, and you know he's got to rest before his big recital tomorrow. Go to sleep. It was just a nightmare.”

“I want Wes,” the kid sobs. “It was the demon thing again, he won't leave me alone.”

“How tragic,” the demon says.

The kid cries and cries, and then disappears all of a sudden, leaving nothing but the bed and the rumpled sheets.

“I can't leave you alone, Soul,” the demon says. “Who else would let you know how worthless you are?”

“No,” says Soul, shaking his head. Wes is still there at the side of the room, watching, and Soul can remember when he was the kid dreaming in the bed, and woke up crying for him. Wes had always come to calm him down—the demon can't rewrite history. “Fuck you. This is a dream.”

“Of course it's a dream,” the demon says derisively. “Recurring. But you're supposed to be an adult now, right? You're supposed to be over these.”

“I am,” Soul says. “And I'm going to wake up.”

His hands twitch on the keys, and one finger sinks down, pinging out a clear “G” note. It sounds right somehow, and the demon flinches back from it, flickering. Soul grins and plays it again, over and over like a bell. The ground shifts beneath him, the sand and sparse grass of the island pushing up through cracks forming in the red and black tiles. The cheap jazz is fading and in its place snippets of Soul's own music is leaking through. Soul closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, it's to the familiar wooden roof of his cottage. It's quiet—he can't hear the storm or any music anymore, and he sits bolt upright, terrified.

“Whoa,” comes a voice. “Calm down.”

Maka is sitting in a chair next to his table, his guitar propped on her knees. She's got one finger on the “G” string, like she was just plucking at it. Soul stares at her, relief and confusion paralyzing him.

“You're okay,” he breathes.

She smiles softly. “Yeah, I'm fine. Which almost was more than I could say for you.”

“I don't—” Soul can't stop staring at her. “I don't understand. How are you—what is—the storm's over?”

She nods. “It's been over for about twenty minutes now. You've been asleep for a few hours. It's about dinnertime. There's a celebratory communal potluck happening in the centre of town right now. Tsubaki was watching you during the storm, but once it was over I told her to join Kilik and his kids and Black*Star. Said I could watch over you. Apparently making sure you stay alive is sort of my thing today.”

“Making sure I stay alive?” Soul says. “I thought—”

“That I was going to get sacrificed?” Maka cuts in. “Like in the story in the guidebook?”

“I—” Soul can feel himself deflating. Her tone is telling him that that's stupid, and she is indeed sitting in front of him, clearly not sacrificed. “Yeah.”

“That's a story we made up for the tourists,” Maka says. “It's a joke among all the islanders. Everyone knows it's not true. If you'd just have talked to Tsubaki for five more minutes before charging off to here, she could have told you that. But she had Fire and Thunder with her and she had to find someone in the crowd that they knew to watch them before she could call Black*Star and go after you and then—”

She moves the guitar off her lap onto another chair and leans forward, putting her face in her hands.

“You could have died,” she says.

“I didn't want you to die,” Soul says weakly. He's struggling to remember the surefire evidence he'd had that had convinced him to dive into the ocean after her. “You—you were upset when the storm came up and you didn't want to talk about it and neither did Black*Star and he's your oldest friend, so it seemed to make sense—”

“I'm going to tell you a story about the storm,” Maka says, sitting upright again. “About twenty or so years ago, the year before I was born, the cloud spirits of this region—yep, there's cloud spirits—and the water spirits here kind of had a war. There was a faction of the cloud spirits that wanted to gain the power to ascend to space and become star spirits, and they were using their lightning to kill and then steal the life force of humans indiscriminately, which is forbidden. The other cloud spirits refused to stop them, and so the water spirits of this island fought back when our island was targeted, and we wiped them out. Every year since then, on the anniversary of the night the “Star Clan”—as the rogue cloud spirits called themselves—were wiped out, the remaining cloud spirits attack the island, just mostly out of spite.”

“But none of the lightning was actually hitting the island,” Soul says. “And that was down to the water spirits, right?”

“Yeah,” she says. “We can manipulate their lightning and draw it to us. We're literally water, so it doesn't hurt us as long as it's spread out. Like, I guess ten spirit lightning bolts all at once on me would kill me, but that wouldn't happen with how we've got it worked out. There's something called the Lightning Squad, and it's a section of the military that's highly trained and has worked out how to deal with the attack so that it's basically harmless. I told you before that music calms us a lot, right? Well, it can help us sync up with each other too, so we use the music pumped out during the storm to keep on the same wavelength and get the right rhythm to just send the lightning back. I've been part of the squad since I was fifteen, and my dad worries about me a lot, but it's not as dangerous as it sounds for us.” She sighs, rubbing at his forehead. “The reason I didn't want to talk about the storm though is because I'd been promoted to the head of the Lightning Squad this year, which is great, but also really stressful. I was worried I'd fuck up, so I just didn't want to think about it until I had to.”

“Oh god,” Soul says slowly. “You were doing your job and then you had to stop and save me and—I almost ruined it all, didn't I?”

She shrugs. “Honestly, yeah. But it was just a moment—my crew were able to take the added strain that me leaving for a minute left, and—I wasn't gonna leave you to die. I couldnt've done that. Especially since you were out there for me.”

Soul flops down on his back again, staring up at the ceiling. “Fuck.”

“What were you doing, Soul?” Maka asks, her voice small. “You can't have been just trying to save me, you—you barely know me, and you almost died. You weren't trying to...”

Soul can hear the dream demon in his head, telling him he's worthless, asking him if he was trying to kill himself.

“No,” he says, and it's to the memory of the demon more than her. “I don't really know what I was doing but I—I think I just wanted to do something right. Something good.”

There's silence for a long moment. Soul turns his cheek into the softness of his bed, and watches Maka. She looks tired.

“You came to visit me and get me to play for you on the dock these past few weeks because you were stressed out about the storm, didn't you,” he says. “Music was helpful, and I was right there.”

“Oh, don't give me that,” Maka says, hearing the accusation, no matter how slight he had meant it. “Like you weren't getting anything out of me hanging around—you were using me as your magical water spirit muse thing. Look at this weird girl-thing, how inspiring.”

“Maybe at the start,” Soul admits. “But it wasn't...” I may have started liking you because of that, but now it's more, he wants to say.

“We're both more than what we wanted out of each other,” Maka says. “And for me, I—I wasn't lying, I do like your music. And you.”

Soul blinks dumbly at her. He has no idea if she means that the way he does, deep in his chest, but she meets his eyes and smiles at him and he smiles back, helpless. With her sitting here in his cottage, there is no sign of the magical side of a water spirit, just the human one. Neither side seems wrong for her anymore.

“I'm really happy you're not dead,” Soul says.

She laughs until her whole face is red. There's tears in her eyes.

“Me too.”

****

They head down to the town potluck as soon as Soul feels up to it and Maka deems him healthy to walk. He's a little weak on his feet, and when they reach the stalls and walls of people that have sprung up in the town square, she takes his hand and leads him through, and doesn't let go for the rest of the evening.

They meet up with Black*Star, Tsubaki, Kilik, and the two little kids. Soul apologizes for frightening them earlier, and they hide from him behind Kilik's legs anyway. Tsubaki yells at him for scaring them all with his stunt, and then grudgingly gives him one of the rolls that are her and Black*Star's contribution to the potluck. Black*Star's still twitchy from the storm, pissed off in a vague way—once he hears what Soul's theories were for him hating the storm, he laughs shortly and explains that he's a cloud spirit himself and hates them all.

“He's the last of the group that called themselves the Star Clan,” Maka whispers to Soul when Black*Star's wandered off in search of more food. “He was just a baby, and when the big fight went down, the cloud spirits all abandoned him—even the ones from the other factions that could've taken him in. Cloud spirits can fly, but they learn when they're about two, and he hadn't learned yet, so he literally fell out of the sky onto the beach.”

“So the island is like his adoptive family,” Soul says. “Can he fly now?”

“No,” Maka says. “But he can shoot a little lightning. He had to give you a controlled shock when I pulled you out of the water to get your heart started again. Oooh look, a cheese platter!”

Soul blinks, absorbing the knowledge that he had been even closer to death than he had originally thought, and follows her to the cheese.

The whole town is out in force, tourists and islanders mingling freely. The sky above is a soft pink fading into a deeper blue farther away from the sun, and the clouds are gone completely. The storm has cleansed the island somehow, and there's an atmosphere of camaraderie between everyone Soul can see. He runs into Liz and Patti at Kid's stall of tiny finger sandwiches, helping him rearrange the display to be symmetrical again everytime someone takes one, and it's a nice break to talk to people who don't know he ran screaming into the ocean today. He sees Kim and Jackie making out over a park bench, and Tsugumi and her various girlfriends talking to Sid. All around him are people he knows, people who have waved to him on the streets, people who have asked him how his day's been when they've bumped into him at the grocery store or the pub. His body is still partially in crisis mode—recovering from his plunge in the sea and still expecting something worse to happen—but as the evening goes on and Maka's hand stays warm in his, he slowly starts to trust in the island again.

Maka drags him over to a group of vaguely intimidating people who are apparently part of her Lightning Squad, and introduces him to them. The introduction is clearly a small punishment for his stupid actions today—one of the spirits, a man called Stein who wears a heavily patch-worked lab coat, gives him a look like he wants to cut him open, and another, a woman named Blair, looks like she wants to eat him up in a very different way. It's disconcerting, to say the least, and Soul knows for sure that even the normal looking blonde woman who stops Stein in the middle of a tirade of threatsprobably hates him more than a little bit for endangering the whole island and himself. When they finally walk away, Maka shoots Soul a sharp-edged smile, and Soul smiles weakly back. He's glad he's not a water spirit.

When the sun sets and the stalls all light up with glowing square lanterns of every shape and size and colour, Maka finally untangles her hand from Soul’s to go and talk to a tall, red-haired man who she says is her father. Soul understands that it’s not a conversation for his ears and he sits down on a bench beside Kid’s stall and turns his back on Maka to watch Tsubaki and Black*Star playing tag with Kilik’s kids.

Kilik sits down next to him with a sigh.

“They look like they’re having fun,” Soul says, nodding towards Fire and Thunder. Kilik smiles.

“Yeah,” he says, strangely heavily. “They like Tsubaki and Black*Star a lot.” He laughs quietly. “Thunder introduced them as ‘my family’ to the guy running the lemon jam stall earlier.”

“Lemon jam?”

“Black*Star swears it’s good.”

There’s a brief silence, and Soul looks over to see that Kilik is staring at the ground.

“Do you think” says Kilik slowly, “that…that something like that could work?”

“What, the three of you?”

“The five of us,” Kilik corrects. “I’m not worried about the three of us. They’ve made it clear to me recently what they think about that.”

Soul smiles. Black*Star’s caught Fire and is parading around with him lifted high over his head, Fire squealing in delight. “I think you should ask Black*Star and Tsubaki about the five of you, not me. They’re more likely to know. But I’m pretty sure unconventional is sort of a thing around here.”

“Almost dying makes you wise, huh?” Kilik asks. “Or is it falling for a water spirit that does that?”

“Fuck off,” Soul says, and the sudden stab of guilt and fear in his gut is cooled by the sound of Kilik’s laughter.

Thunder trips and Kilik jumps up instantly to go see if she’s alright. Soul’s alone only for a moment before Maka is back, appearing beside the bench. Soul stares up at her, feeling stupid and intensely lucky.

“Hey,” she says, smiling. Soul holds out his hand without thinking and she takes it immediately, lacing their fingers together. “What were you and Kilik talking about?”

“Oh, you know,” Soul says, standing slowly. “Family and homes and stuff. How’d it go with your dad?”

Maka shrugs, but her smile doesn’t dim. “Fine. He’s an idiot, as always, but…family, right?”

“Yeah,” Soul says. Around him the town is still bustling away, lit up in the soft reds and blues and yellows of the lanterns, and Maka’s hand is warm in his. He squeezes her fingers and gets an answering squeeze in return. “Yeah.”

God, today has been one of the biggest failures of his entire life—he tried to save someone and ended up needing to be saved—and yet the sickness in his stomach is only slight, pushed back each time it tries to rise by the sight of Maka still there beside him. He hasn't ruined everything. He's still here. Maka's still here. The island is still here.

And if he is falling, he knows there’s arms there to catch him.

They eat food into the night, and when Soul and Maka part ways and he heads alone back down to his cottage, he doesn't dream—not of drowning, not of demons, not of anything at all.

****

A couple of weeks later, Wes calls and Soul picks up the phone. He sits on his bed in the morning light and tells him about the album he's working on, how he's found a couple musicians on the island to collaborate with on certain songs; Kilik and his drums, Kid on the violin, Maka and her voice and the sounds she can make with water. Wes sounds pleased for him, and when he jokes that it doesn't sound like the kind of music that their parents will play at their parties, Soul laughs along with him.

“So, you are planning on staying there then,” Wes says. “For a while?”

Soul pauses and glances down at the bed, at where Maka is lying sprawled out and still asleep. Four days ago they had walked out to the forest and she had stood on a rock and kissed him. Last night she had fallen asleep in his bed in the middle of telling him a story about her mother's adventures in the Pacific Ocean. As soon as he gets off the phone with Wes, he's going to make her breakfast, and kiss her awake, and ask her out on a proper date.

“Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I think this is home.”


End file.
